The #nastyfew in the era of #climatechaos and social breakdown

In this accelerating collapse – where #climatechaos spirals and #neoliberalism guts the very idea of society – we urgently need to confront a painful truth: it’s simple, the #nastyfew are a parasite class. And that this class feeds on the very foundations of well-being, survival, and joy that the majority of the global population desperately needs. They are the ones who keep the engines of destruction humming, not out of necessity, but out of greed and fear of irrelevance. These people and their institutions flourish precisely because most of us are lost in the distractions of #mainstreaming and false hopes of reform.

The big picture is Capitalism’s global predation – Zooming out, this is the capitalist class – those who own, hoard, and manipulate the resources, labour, and attention of billions. They weaponise economics, push debt, drive resource wars, and now greenwash their way through #climatecollapse while investing in bunkers and surveillance. They bankroll right-wing populism and push for austerity, while lobby for tax cuts as profits soar.

The close-up: People you might know, zoom in, and things get messier. This parasitic drive isn’t only held by billionaire industrialists. In many cases, it’s people close to us, sometimes unknowingly, sometimes not. These are the minor functionaries of capital, the wannabe gatekeepers, and the careerists who believe that “playing the game” will protect them from collapse.

In tech, it is clearer, parasites wearing hoodies. The Bitcoin Bros: Obsessively libertarian, they fetishise decentralisation while promoting hyper-individualist economics that mirrors the worst of Wall Street. They talk about freedom but build systems of exclusion, greed, and extraction. If you spend your energy pushing #crypto as liberation while ignoring ecological and social costs, you are enabling the parasite class – and likely dreaming of becoming one.

The #mainstreaming talking about this “inside” issue

#Dotcons Executives: The Zuckerbergs, Bezoses, and Musks of the world are obvious examples. But look further down the food chain: the startup bros who pivot endlessly looking for #VC buyouts, the marketing execs who gut communities for ad metrics, the devs who code endless optimisations to squeeze more value out of users. If your business model depends on surveillance, addiction and enclosure, you’re the problem.

The careerist #NGO tech elitists: Yes, even the “good” sector can be captured. NGO professionals who endlessly hold conferences and produce whitepapers while blocking actual grassroots projects. They take seats at tables designed to exclude the people doing real, messy, transformative work. They don’t oppose the #nastyfew; they stabilise their control.

So what do we do? First, see clearly, name the parasitism. Understand that systems don’t just fail; they are designed to benefit the few and contain the many. Second, build bridges away from this mess – rooted in the #4opens: open data, open source, open process, and open standards. This is the beginning of composting the parasite class. Third, support native projects: not the VC-funded copies or the corporate-friendly NGOs, but the messy, local, collaborative tools and networks that build resilience and joy from the ground up. Projects like #IndymediaBack, #OMN, and others pushing against the tide are places to start.

Because in the end, the parasite class only exists as long as we feed it.

Let’s stop, please.

The Mess We Make (Again… and again)

Ten years ago, I remember being told, often condescendingly, with smug certainty, that hosting in the cloud was the future. That what I was working on, #DIY grassroots self and community hosted tech was the dinosaur, a dead end, old obsolete thinking, out of touch. Despite spending years pointing out the obvious flaws in this pushing, for this I got only that my “native” path was irrelevant, for Luddites, they said. Legacy thinking, dead tech walking.

Well, here we are, a decade later. And guess what the cloud: It was expensive, less performant, less secure, and a gateway to increasingly exploitative pricing models. This isn’t hindsight bias, the warning signs were always there. But many #fahernista and #geekproblem people get caught up in the glossy surface and tech hype mess, repeating the same mistake we’ve made across generations of #geekproblem tech, believing scale and #PR buzzwords were synonymous with progress.

Let’s now be clear on what actually happened.

We handed over infrastructure to a handful of giant platforms that lock us in and bleed us dry.
We lost resilience, sovereignty, and basic control over our own data.
We normalized rent-seeking as a business model.
We pushed decentralization off a cliff and called it “abstraction.”

Meanwhile, local compute got cheaper, storage exploded in affordability, bandwidth costs continued to fall, #dotcons threats increased. And guess what? Running things locally started making sense again, just like it always does when the #PR smoke clears and mess composts.

The lesson, which we need to now bring to #crypto and #AI, just because something is fashionable doesn’t make it in any way real or sustainable. That tech #PR hype cycles aren’t innovation, they’re marketing. And when you stop looking at the core trends (cost, control, resilience) and just ride the buzz, you’ll end up where we are now, mess, bloated budgets, shrinking trust, and a growing #techshit pile to clean up.

We need to re-learn the value of #KISS grounded thinking, to remember that local, #4opens, transparent, and interoperable #openweb systems aren’t retro, they’re essential. This isn’t about nostalgia for the old paths, It’s about having power over our basic infrastructure again. The cloud, at the time and in looking over our shoulders, was smoke and mirrors, a detour, it’s now past time to get back on the real progressive #Fediverse path.

History has a lot to say on the peasant revolt vs. liberal half-measures

Metaphors matter, composting the current paths in #AI

This #AI-meets-copyright consultation is another wave of opportunistic grafting, much like the #crypto mess before it. The rhetoric about leveraging AI to “grow the economy” and “improve public services” is justification for a “commons” grab by nasty interests. It’s the normal pushing in the ongoing path of #deathcult worship, 40 years of #neoliberalism, digging us deeper into a hole we desperately need to climb out of.

The metaphor of composting captures the urgent need for discernment, what cultural and technological artefacts still serve us in the onrushing era of #climatechaos, and what is toxic and must urgently be composted. People ask what do we mean by this, in its cultural sense, composting is about adapting the remnants of the deathcult into something fertile for a radically different way of life. This is achievable only if we act swiftly to embrace radical change while there’s still time for the metaphor to remain metaphorical. Delay, and #climatechaos will render the metaphor physical – turning our cities, infrastructure, and economies into literal waste piles, where the nasty few will be left to fights over the scraps.

This urgent need for sorting what’s salvageable from what’s dead weight, requires critical thinking and collaborative effort, we need projects like the #OGB to build affinity groups of action, to balance radical action with consensus-building. While consensus about the failures of the last 40 years is important, we need to avoid falling into the trap of endless sterile deliberation. The urgency of the moment demands bold, practical action to balance the needed intellectual and rhetorical critique.

The metaphorical shovel is right there, let’s use it. What we need, is a clear framework (#OMN) to identify what is compostable (ideas, tools, and systems that can support a degrowth future) and what must be discarded to the compost heap. A part of this is cultural agitation to shake people out of their complacency, as the economy of thinking must shift radically. This has to be on a positive path to community resilience, building networks of mutual support, trust and regenerative paths, not the default #deathcult’s control/fear paradigm we are currently walking.

#AI could play a role if it’s on the #4opens path, but the current #dotcons push to #AI is part of a “last binge” of neoliberal exploitation, it’s largely irrelevant to the path we need to take, we need to urgently ignore and shift #mainstreaming conversations to focus on what we actually need. The challenge is to redirect the narrative, how can we use our technology to empower grassroots alternatives to build a post-death cult world? We need to do this in tandem with radical action for fertile new growth. Delay, and we’ll find ourselves buried under the non-compostable remnants of a civilization too slow to adapt. It well pastime to grab that shovel. #OMN

The #deathcult is neoliberalism