World of war – The global battle for industrial supremacy

I just was at a talk from the Oxford University. The rise of economic nationalism and the return of state power – While the speakers skirt around key terms like socialism and justice, the implications of what’s discussed are clear, the #neoliberal era is ended, and what comes next is still being shaped.

For the current #mainstreaming the rise of Economic Nationalism is a reaction to the rise of China, the talk explores how China’s rise has catalysed a shift across the rich world – from the free-market dogma of the last 40 years to a new age of “industrial policy”. In essence, the old exploitive game of “global competitiveness” is giving way to nationalist state planning, even if the elitists are reluctant to call it mixed economy, social democracy or even socialism.

In the U.S., this has taken the form of tariffs and export controls, which, let’s be honest, function as subsidies for American corporations. In the #EU, there’s similar movement, more tentative, but real. One key example is the #ReArm Europe military initiative: a push toward industrial resilience, framed through the lens of security but rooted in state-led economic intervention. An example is https://cristinacaffarra.blog/2025/02/03/we-have-to-get-to-work-and-put-europe-first-but-we-are-late-terribly-late/ in tech.

This Western new wave of competitive protectionism benefits the rich nations who already have resources, capital, and infrastructure. Developing countries? They’re simply left behind, again. But, we might actually be on a different path, this time, China’s alternative model is working, the Global South is watching, and in some cases, benefiting.

The result? We’re seeing cracks in the global order that’s been in place since the 1980s – a system that privileged Western elitists while systematically extracting from the rest. A new international economic order may be emerging, and it might – on balance – benefit the South more than the North?

In the USA we see two faces of the same coin, it’s worth noting that both Biden and Trump have walked similar paths. Biden sells this industrial policy as justice-driven, future-focused action. Trump dresses it in nationalist bluster. But the outcome is largely the same: a shift away from free markets and toward controlled, strategic planning – just with different elitist backers benefiting behind the thin curtains.

This opens up the #deathcult for a need for reckoning. Here’s where we need to be blunt: the last 40 years of #neoliberalism – of #mainstreaming market worship – was a mistake. A disaster. A #deathcult. It failed to deliver for most of the people in the west, and was a disaster for the rest of the world. And now, with #climatechaos accelerating, that failure is no longer academic – it’s existential. The current shift to state-led green transitions is a tacit admission that capitalism, cannot handle any future. To shift this, we need strong, progressive states, and we need them fast.

Yet nowhere in the talk does the word socialism come up, despite the obvious trajectory. Nor do we hear the word justice, even though that’s what’s at stake. This silence says a lot about #mainstreaming transitioning. But here’s a constructive provocation: where are the academic voices of responsibility?

On this subject I have a plan – Think Globally, Act Locally – in Oxford and similar elitist institutions, generations of economists, political scientists, and technocrats trained the youth to believe in the religion of markets. Now this mess making is over, can we now ask – kindly but firmly – for these same institutions to stand up and apologize? Not in shame, but in honesty.

Apologize for worshipping failed ideologies. For pushing a worldview that has brought us to the edge. And crucially, explain why they were wrong and what they’ve learned. This act alone could unfreeze some of the apathy among the youth – many of whom intuit the coming crisis but feel trapped in a world still pretending business-as-usual is viable.

We are In transition, yes the language in the talk is still dressed in #neoliberal garments, but the substance is moving toward planned economies, redistributed investment, and long-term thinking. It’s socialism in practice, even if not yet in name. So let’s get on with composting the ideology of the last 40 years. Let it rot, fertilize something new with what’s left. It’s past time to act. Not with nostalgia, but with clarity.

#Oxford #talk

The Said Business School is a temple of the #deathcult

What we need is useful compost layer’s for growing native projects

Compost, not illusions, is a first step – A radical look at “light green” tech – For a second step we need a useful compost layer for growing native projects, like the #OMN. What we currently have in most so-called “green technology” promoted through #mainstreaming and #fashernista narratives is not ecological in substance – it’s performative environmentalism, built on omission, distortion, and branding. To help make sense of this mess, let’s use the lenses of the #4opens, the #geekproblem, and the broader #openweb.

The mess is “green” as branding, not substance. Most of today’s #mainstreaming “green” tech, like, electric vehicles (EVs), solar panels, wind turbines – is “green” in aesthetics, not in impact. These are products sold as solutions, but they’re too often rooted in the same extractive, centralized, and opaque paths and systems that caused the problems in the first place. This is the heart of the lie we need to compost, as the needed social change cannot grow from toxic soil, no matter how glossy and plastic the flower appears. If we ignore the roots, we get more illusions.

Watch this critique: The True Cost of Green Tech (YouTube)

The #OMN critique is to move past the false solutions and the broken paths. Yes, light green solutions pushed by institutions and NGOs aren’t inherently bad technologies – but their production, distribution, and governance models are deeply flawed. They violate every principle of the #4opens:

Open data: No honest accounting of full lifecycle impacts.
Open source: Dominated by proprietary, locked-in systems.
Open process: Controlled by corporations and states, with no meaningful public input.
Open standards: Sacrificed for monopolistic vertical integration (e.g., Tesla).

The result is more #techshit – waste and violence hidden behind shiny #PR branding. Even our weak #NGOs point out the brutal costs: resource extraction (cobalt, lithium, rare earths), labour exploitation (child and Uyghur forced labour), and environmental dumping. These costs are buried beneath greenwashed PR aesthetics, making them palatable to consumers but invisible to our shared, and needed critique.

The #geekproblem, the “problem” in much geek culture, is tech as saviour, this is the belief that technology itself is inherently progressive. This takes us down the paths where proposed “fixes” like nuclear follow the same flawed paths: centralized, capital-intensive, top-down systems cloaked in the language of innovation. It’s new wrapping, same old crap.

This is not a path to climate justice. It’s a continuation of the #deathcult – digital colonialism powered by extraction, slavery, and silence. No genuine social or ecological transformation can grow from this poisoned foundation. Where the real cost of “green” tech is not just ignored, it’s deliberately silenced. This silence isn’t accidental; it’s structural. The narrative that we can “buy better things” and consume our way out of crisis is a pacifying lie. It sells comfort, not change.

True ecological technology must be social first. It should grow from transformation, not transaction. We need to compost the lies to grow real alternatives. We must compost the #mainstreaming myths-this is the role of #hashtag stories.

There are meany paths to take, the one I focus on is reclaiming small-scale, peer-produced infrastructure. Using the #4opens to demand transparency, accountability, and participation. Solar panels and EVs have a role, but only when embedded in a radically #degrowth paths: Open governance (#OGB), local, decentralized production (right to repair, community assembly), circular economy (reuse, repurpose, recycle), humanism as non-negotiable (no slavery, no offshoring of harm). It’s a simple, not to say old-fashioned idea of humanistic progress, maybe we can do this better this time, I hope.

Conclusion, please #KISS the illusions goodbye, build the compost heap. Now also, please remember, we are not against technology – we’re against the lies that accompany it. As long as we keep lying about the nature of change, we cannot begin the real work. We need fertile ground – a compost layer for native projects like the #OMN – to push openness and cultivate the genuine ecological thinking we need to grow. It’s way past time for people to lift their heads from worshipping the #deathcult and stop being prats about this.

Enclosure of the openweb

This spirit of the early internet and #WWW – sharing, remixing, collectively creating – is the heart of what we once called the #openweb. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a space of possibilities, commons, where you could take what you needed and leave something behind, hyperlink by hyperlink. The tools were open – #RSS feeds, #APIs, #XMPP, #indymedia were built to bridge between ideas and movements, not walls of monetized algorithmic sludge we have today.

But the #dotcons came. They fenced in the wild garden. What we’re living through now is a digital version of the enclosure of the commons, a #neoliberal land grab dressed in Silicon Valley T-shirts. Just like in 16th-century England, they drew arbitrary lines around our #4opens shared land (data, conversation, culture), declared it private property, and shut the gates. And we, the people, got algorithmic slop in return.

The comparison isn’t metaphor – it’s literal. Just as the landed gentry stole the commons to fuel the industrial revolution, the tech gentry stole our digital commons to feed surveillance capitalism. They did it through legalese, marketing BS, and brute force. We were left outside the firewalls, told to be thankful for “free” services while they harvested our metadata lives to sell back to us as advertisements and social control.

The #techbros didn’t invent this theft. They just updated the tools, the same ideological mess that displaced peasants from their land now displaces communities from their networks and platforms, kills independent sites, closes APIs, and locks away archives behind paywalls. Twitter’s 2023 shutdown of free API access? A textbook enclosure. Hundreds of # fashionista grassroots tools and bots vanished overnight, #Techshit at its most brazen.

And then there’s #RSS – the veins of the old web. Stabbed slowly. First by Facebook, then by Google. For the #fashernistas, the blade fell hardest in 2013 with the death of Google Reader, a quiet coup that pushed most of us into the fenced-off gardens of algorithmic consumption we live so much of our lives in today. The commons didn’t vanish; it was actively destroyed, under the smog of monetization, “engagement,” and corporate “safety.”

This isn’t #progress, it’s theft. The same kind that wears the mask of legitimacy because lawyers and lobbyists made it look neat on paper. The reality is old, it’s a #classwar fought with code instead of clubs, and it’s won because we stopped remembering what common “land” even looked like.

But not everything is lost. The #Fediverse, the #OMN (Open Media Network) still plants seeds in the cracks. #Wikidata, #OpenStreetMap, the #ActivityPub protocol, these are digital hedgerows that survived the scorched earth. They are messy, collaborative, and unmonetized. That’s their strength, that’s what the #fashernistas to often don’t get – they can’t sell what they can’t own.

The #geekproblem here is fatal, in both the grassroots and the #dotcons, too many technologists are blind to the politics in their code. In the #mainstreaming, they build better tools for corporations that destroy the commons. Over and over again. The solution? For the grassroots coders, compost the #techshit, seed something else, and reclaim what was always ours. As when we lift the lid, the #dotcons mess our unthinking #fashernistras, #NGO geeks call the internet is simply a thin veneer on top of what is actually ours, the #openweb

Let’s stop being polite about this. The #closedweb is a crime scene. The platforms we rely on are bonfires of common culture, feeding the engines of the next wave of control. If we don’t remember how we got here, we can’t get out. It’s time to say it plain: The privatized web is a #deathcult, and only a #4opens reboot can bring life back.

An article: https://johl.io/blog/enclosures-and-the-open-web

The West, Russia, and the madness of mutual sabotage

With the current hard move to the right let’s look at the current mess more clearly, we’re watching the slow-motion implosion of geopolitical sanity, driven by a feedback loop of paranoia, expansionism, and elitist delusion all round. I will use an example, the Russian neo-monarchy we installed with the fall of the #USSR is both authoritarian and insulated from reality, it harbours a deeply ingrained – but not entirely unfounded – fear, that the West wants to partition and neuter Russia, to finally break its imperial spine and sideline it permanently from global power.

The response to this is predicable, the wannabe Russian Empire moves to lash outwards. Expand. Destabilize. Subvert. Sabotage. Whether in Ukraine, Syria, Africa, or via bot farms and proxy networks, the strategy is the same, externalize the crisis, manufacture mess, weaken the “enemy”, and in doing so, fortify internal control. It’s a survival tactic wrapped in a brutal shell of historical grievance and nationalist myth-making.

But, what we do, in the West, in response is the real insanity, our response mirrors the very thing they fear. The West’s led by Washington #neoliberal hawks, Eurocentrists, and the ever-profitable security-industrial complex – isn’t, peace, trade, exchange, strategic clarity, de-escalation, or rebuilding multilateral resilience. No. It’s tit-for-tat sabotage, economic warfare, arms races, and public rhetoric that edges ever closer to advocating regime change, disintegration, and total subjugation. The wet dream of the #nastyfew think tank ghouls, a post-Russia carved up, pacified, and absorbed into the #closedweb of western corporate “freedom.” they tried it after the breakup of the #USSR, and now we repeat the same crap plan.

Do we really think it helps to become the very monster the Russians, are not without foundation, paranoid about, and already believe us to be? Yes, we do keep repeating this path of endless #fuckwittery feedback loops, imperial reaction and counter-reaction has been the geopolitics of the #deathcult for way too long. The world we have now is a paranoid empire meets a suicidal empire, Russia, trapped in its authoritarian echo chamber, acts from a place of imperial insecurity. It remembers the Cold War, NATO’s slow crawl eastward, the gutting of its economy in the ’90s under western advisors. Its fear is rooted in historical trauma, yes – but also in hard analysis. The West has pushed precisely the policies Russia fears.

Instead of “us” building genuine alternatives – non-aligned diplomacy, economic multipolarity, climate cooperation – we escalate. We double down. We treat their paranoia not as a challenge to deconstruct but a justification for more militarism, more sanctions, more media war, more fantasy of breaking the Russian state entirely. This is not a path to peace, this is not a path to any humanistic justice, this is mess-making on a planetary scale. And in the era of #climatechaos, where we face shared planetary collapse, it’s more than just dangerous, it’s become the hard right’s apocalyptic fantasy of civilizational suicide.

Let’s be very clear, this cycle is not driven by “the people.” It’s the #nastyfew, the hard-right elitists, ideologues, the nationalist technocrats and billionaire opportunists who feed on fear and profit from instability. In Russia, they wear the mask of Orthodox autocracy. In the West, they wear the suits of think tanks and boardrooms. But their vision is now the same, control through collapse.

They aren’t interested in saving the world, they want to own the wreckage. They’re building bunkers while the rest of us fight over ruins. They’re funding war while cutting climate adaptation, speak of “freedom” while mining the last drops of oil and blood. This isn’t realism, it’s delusion, this isn’t defence, it’s offence by inertia, this isn’t strategy. What it is, is the new #deathcult replacing the dead old one of 40 years of neoliberalism.

Where now? What we don’t need is more war games, we don’t need to break Russia or “win” against China. A key though is we don’t need to be right – we need to be alive, and for that we need radical de-escalation, grassroots diplomacy, and growing planetary solidarity. The answer to paranoid imperialism isn’t more imperialism – it’s compost. Yes, compost. We need to take this mess, this decaying structure of late-stage empire, and break it down into something fertile.

We need to stop thinking like empires and start thinking like ecologies. Build networks, not states, trust, not surveillance, infrastructure of care, not bombs, media for truth, not narrative warfare. We can’t outsource survival to failing nation-states, or hand over justice to militaries. What we need is a grassroots push to step outside the spiral. The #openweb gives us a glimpse of this possibility: federated, decentralized, trust-based networks that grow from the ground, not fall from the sky. What comes next depends on what we build in the growing cracks. Because we can’t keep feeding this mess.

Why the Russian constitution matters: the dark arts of constitutional law

Ignore the #AI mess, build the #OMN – This is a path we need

Yes, I read the post. And yes, the despair is real. The #openweb is being bulldozed by #GenerativeAI like a forest clear-cut by machines driven not by need, but by greed, profit and power for the #nsatyfew. Yes, the #deathcult of techno-capitalism is running its script to the bitter and dead-end. And yes, I too wonder if we’ll survive this, but as you say we have a path, and it’s not new. It’s simple, it’s human, and it’s working.

It’s called the #Fediverse and the next step is “native” applications on this path like the #OMN – the Open Media Network – and it’s built from the bones and dreams of the old web: #4opens, #KISS principles, and trust-based, #DIY infrastructure. It’s a messy, human soup of tagged data and federated flows where people and content are commons by default, not walled gardens or extractive silos.

The magic? It’s not even in the tech (though that matters). It’s in the “common sense” at the core – Anything in, anything out – mediated by trust. Lossy? Yes. Redundant? Absolutely. But that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s what makes it resilient. The #geekproblem keeps trying to engineer this out, but we need to compost that #techshit into something useful, working tools for real people, growing radical networks of care and change.

To those staring into the digital abyss and seeing only Ozymandias and decay, look sideways, the #Fediverse lives. The #openweb still works. And we’re building new foundations from the compost of the old. We do not need to be swept along with the gray goo of #AI, we can simply not go there, and instead stay here and do the work that is needed.

“I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
–Percy Bysshe Shelley

And yes, I see it too, we’ve been holding back on our own power, hesitant. Maybe our despair is part of the mess we need to shake ourselves awake from. So I ask what positive path can we walk? What part of the #OMN can we all help compost, code, shape, or share?

Let’s rebuild the net with hands in the soil and eyes on the stars. Because the answer isn’t new. It’s what we’ve always done when things fall apart, we grow.

Notes from the Bubble: A Bad Conservative Pantomime at Balliol

At Balliol, the event is thick with what I’d call posh gits. The event felt conservative, not just politically, but in the deeper, old-school, institutional sense. The air was deep with entitlement. The room was full of young wannabes, the privileged types who don’t need to try, the future “elitists” rehearsing for their inheritance.

The line-up set the tone:

The older “priests” of the cult
First up, a writer for The Spectator.
Then a student from Dublin, the token woman?
Finally, a smug young man who writes for The Times and a news blog – Unheard basically right-wing student cosplay.

The first guy? A damp squib. A classic Tory prat with nothing to say. He took a predictable swipe at the “fashionable” paths universities have taken, diversity, equality, inclusion checklist from a conservative, nostalgic lens. His question, “Who does the university serve?” landed flat. He missed the moment entirely, pining for a return to the old order while ignoring the real crisis: who has power now, and how it’s wielded.

Next came the debating society woman. Equally, damp. Her speech was a buzzword salad of all the boo-words “they” used to signal disdain for anything progressive. It was as if someone had copy-pasted a Times’ opinion page into her brain. No spark. No substance. Conservative zombie thinking, the kind we thought had decayed along with the rest of the mainstream mess. Her conclusion? Bow to the establishment. Academia, she said, is about “developing character.” Whatever that means in this context, it sure didn’t sound like any challenge to the status quo.

Then the last guy. God help us. Public school, of course. He opened with “woke”, and the room laughed. He played the “fascist” card as a joke. More laughs. Eventually, he got to the point: universities, he claimed, are driven by bureaucracy following social trends. His example? In 2011, gender became the vector of change. Now, in his area, philosophy, bureaucrats impose “care” as a form of control. A tangle of half-thoughts and culture war agenda. He described a shadowy “bureaucratic class” at the heart of the university, the deep state of academia. The audience chuckled. But behind the lols, there was a whiff of fear?

Later, an older man, the priests of the cult, responded patronisingly to a question from a young right-wing woman. She asked something in earnest, and he waved it off like a bore at a dinner party.

Then a #fashernista liberal offered a question that began with all the right liberal signals but ended on a strangely rightward note, a sort of horseshoe moment in miniature.

One posh git got up to ponder: “Are universities for jobs or knowledge?” No mention of progressive public good, human flourishing, or collective liberation, just the normal #mainstreaming.

A recurring theme was the power imbalance between bureaucrats and academic staff, with students positioned as consumers, granted power by their tuition fees. The marketization of education has become normalised, ironically, these people hate markets and love hierarchy, so long as they sit comfortably at the top.

The panel discussed Blair-era university expansion as a kind of moral failing. Universities, have grown too big to care about individuals. A strange complaint from people who seem fine with the erosion of care as a value in every other domain.

What was missing throughout? Any real commitment to learning. Any fire. Any imagination.

Instead, we got rigid academic standards used as shields against criticism. A proud conformism. No wonder “innovation” gets crushed, the whole system selects for obedience wrapped in polish.

A rare, substantial question came from the audience: someone brought actual data about the growth of “woke” discourse. Where does the pressure come from, upstream (ideology, power) or downstream (social media)? The dominant theme, the lowest common denominator thinking. A retreat from ambition under the guise of “maximum inclusivity.”

One speaker touched briefly on humanism, the idea of creating knowledge for the public good. But it was an aside, quickly buried under the usual careerist rhetoric. Again and again, they insisted they had no ideology. But the dominant ideology was everywhere: jobs, prestige, status.

The whole event kept circling one unspoken truth: things are breaking down, but instead of grappling with that rupture, they reinterpreted it as nostalgia or bureaucratic failure or “wokeness gone too far.” Because the system they’re defending, consciously or not, no longer works for most of us, these guys are uninterested in composting the mess.

It’s in the Walls

These guys’ waste time, lives and distract focus, lifting the lid, a mess, maybe their narrow point of view has some value sometimes, but I did not see it at then event or in the groups’ history #frendlyenemies #spoilers #energyvampires #deathcult

#Oxford #Event

Don’t be a prat, please try and recognize the roots of issues

Horizontal people always get fucked over by vertical people. This is normal, why? Because horizontals give away power to build social fabric, while verticals hoard and concentrate power to extract and dominate. Every. Single. Time.

And the only thing that makes horizontals work, in the face of such mess making, is shared worldview, which we currently lack. Instead, we’ve got swarms of #stupidindividualism, where everyone thinks they’re the centre of the universe, interpreting everything as if their personal “common sense” whims are political strategy. And then, surprise! We keep getting steam rolled.

An example, let’s bring in the rot of #postmodernism, the #pomo guy proudly clams that “Ah, but classification requires a classifier!” This is what #postmodernism does to your brain. It unplugs you from reality while pretending it’s insight. It’s true that classifiers precede categories linguistically. But the material world precedes both. Rocks didn’t need a PhD to be granite.

This kind of derangement isn’t just stupid, it’s systemically useful to the #deathcult. Because if you believe that value only exists if humans assign it, then a tree has no value unless it can be turned into toilet paper. A whale has no value unless it can be monetized or aestheticized. Nature becomes valueless. And so it’s obliterated.

Meanwhile, people in the #fediverse are still pretending codebases matter more than people. No. The value of the Fediverse is in the humans running the instances and inhabiting them. Not the bloody Git repos. Without people, the code is just more maths.

On this #FOSS path, don’t be a prat. Recognize the root issue:

The #geekproblem
The collapse of shared worldview
The enshrinement of individual narcissism over collective meaning
The complete #deathcult worship of self over system pushed by our #nastyfew

Let’s compost this mess. #OMN #OGB #4opens #indymediaback

Digging over the rot and planting something more real

Q: People are angry about #AI scrapers and that this is exploiting everything for “free” – our art, our words, our data. But let’s be honest, we’ve spent the last 40 years gorging on “free” content online, music, games, video, writing, without paying for a thing unless forced to with a paywall. Yes. We block the ads, we hate the tracking, and we very rarely donate. So… with the idea that everything has to be paid for, are we really that different from the AI scraping machine?

A: The current “common sense” frames this as a moral issue, but it’s better seen as a systematic one. And that’s where people keep getting lost in talking about this.

We live in a society rooted in greed and extraction. That’s the baseline. It’s called capitalism, and for the last 40 years it’s been accelerated by the neoliberal #deathcult, where today “ethics” is bought in plastic tubs of organic yogurt at our local supermarket.

What grows out of this shit heap? #Stupidindividualism, people demanding everything for free while shouting about their personal rights to consume. They want to save the planet, but only with next-day delivery and zero commitment. Then you’ve got the #fashionistas – the “good people” who “perform” care while feeding the same destructive paths. It’s not irony, it’s the logic of the path we take.

No, I don’t want tracking ads. No, I don’t want my ideas and writing turned into #AI sludge. But I’m also not pretending this is a matter of “personal choice”, when we need to shout loudly and continually that it’s a system built to turn “creators” into social shit and call it innovation, when better to speak truth and call it compost.

We don’t fix this by feeling guilty, we fix it by building something else. That’s what #OMN is for, that’s why #4opens matter. Public media, open processes, radical trust, of native #openweb paths, not just another polished platform for exploitation with feel good #UX

It’s not about blame. It’s about digging over the rot and planting something more real #KISS

Without discomfort, we won’t challenge the system we’re still living inside

A problem we’ve inherited from the last ten years of corporate social media, the #dotcons, is the toxic confusion of the personal and the public. Platforms like #Facebook and #Twitter blurred the lines between private conversation and public broadcasting, monetizing both as if they were the same. That mess wasn’t accidental; it was profitable.

Unfortunately, we’ve reproduced this mess on the #Fediverse without properly composting it first. What does that mean? We’ve taken this tangled, unhealthy paths and rebuilt them with new tools, many of them open-source, but we haven’t separated the core issues or composted the conceptual issue. As a result, we still see confusion around what content belongs in the public commons and what should stay private. People are still posting as if they’re in a private chat while standing on a soapbox, or trying to gate keep public news through private group dynamics.

The reality is: we already have a clear, simple solution.

The Fediverse is public. It is for public media, public conversation, news, projects, what we want to share with the world.
Encrypted chat apps (like Signal) are for private communication, what we want to keep between individuals or trusted groups.

This needs to be simple #KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid, but instead, we have well-meaning but unthinking devs and users trying to remix the worst of #dotcons culture, mushing together public and private spaces, throwing moderation at everything like it’s a catch-all fix, and muddying the waters of what these networks are actually for.

This is not innovation, it’s common crap behavior inherited from systems built to manipulate, monetize, and pacify us all. If we want more of real, trusted, meaningful media, we have to get back to basics: public news needs to be built on #4opens, and it needs to be created, distributed, and discussed in public spaces.

That’s why projects like #OMN (Open Media Network), #OGB (Open Governance Body), and the #indymediaback reboot matter. They offer paths where grassroots, trust-based publishing thrives again, outside #NGO capture and corporate control and enclosure.

With this change in mind, why the #Deathcult Hashtag?

People often ask why I use the hashtag #deathcult so much. It’s provocative, yes, but it’s not just for shock value. It’s a term that names the dominant ideology of the last 40 years: #neoliberalism. An ideology so pervasive that most people can’t even see it any more, even while it’s actively eroding the very values they claim to be upholding.

You see this when a liberal proudly buys “organic” yogurt at Safeway while supporting systems that are destroying the planet. That’s not just irony, that’s the entire logic of the deathcult. It’s the normalization of destruction wrapped in “ethical” branding. And no, it’s not just the yogurt, that’s just the joke. It’s everything: our phones, our work, our schools, our activism.

If you can’t find a part of your life untouched by the deathcult, it’s because it has touched everything. That’s why the hashtag exists: to make people uncomfortable. Because without that discomfort, we won’t challenge the roots of the system we’re all still living inside.

This movement isn’t about reinventing wheels, it’s about returning to native paths. The public internet worked before. Let’s compost the #techshit by usefully separating the public from the private, and rebuild the “native” path on clear, #4opens foundations.

We can do better, we already know how, let’s stop pretending we don’t.

If I were a Communist

Let’s get the shit-shoveling out of the way first. People get twitchy about the word Communism, waving their arms about “utopian” back-to-the-land communes or religious cults that gave up on society and ran off into the woods, on one side and on the other expansionist empires. That’s not what we’re talking about. Those were retreats, both dead ends. They didn’t believe the world can change, so they isolated themselves and built closed states in the shadows of the #deathcult empire we to often live in. That’s not compost, that’s too often decay.

What I would mean by Communism is radically simple: a society based on practical equality. That means everyone has what they need, and nobody gets to hoard. It’s not abstract, it’s built on what people can do and what they really need, no more and no less.

And this grows out of a basic truth, humans are social creatures. We exist inside society, not apart from it. So any real ethics, any workable economics, has to start there. The individual is not some walled-off unit of value, that’s the poison the #deathcult worships. And under the current system, that poison is poured into everything. It’s why we get so much waste, so much suffering, and why inequality isn’t a glitch, it’s the damn #mainstreaming path.

So let’s be honest. There are only two ways to organize society: Slavery or Equality. Everything else is a mask. What we’ve got now is, for most people, the latest version of slavery – Wage Labour – which is just chattel slavery with the branding updated, and the chains made invisible. The #nastyfew ruling class, the “worthy”, decide what’s valuable and over the long term try and squeeze the rest of us dry. These self-declared “useful” people are entirely parasitic. The only productive class is the one they exploit: the workers, the creators, the growers. The rest are just shuffling paper and shifting blame, smoke and mirrors.

Every age has dressed this up differently. Rome had chains. Feudalism had serfs. Now we have debt, wages, and endless hustle. Same shit, different form. But the composting truth, we’ve arrived at a point in history where this can break down. The system that enslaved us has finally created the possibility of liberation. That’s the dialectic, out of the rot, we can grow something living.

Communism does not need to be a dream – it can be a practical toolkit for that growth. It says:

From each according to their capacity, to each according to their need.

And when they ask, “But how will you measure someone’s need?” we answer, in a real society, people grow up inside a culture of mutual care. You stop thinking in terms of what you can grab and start thinking in terms of what you can share. The culture composts greed. The idea of stepping on someone else to get ahead just doesn’t make sense anymore.

You want doctors? You make space for people who want to heal, not for those who want a title and a paycheck. The community will support their learning because everyone benefits. A fake doctor who slides through on bullshit credentials won’t last long in a society that knows what real care looks like. The mask won’t work anymore.

Yes, we’ll still need to deal with logistics, conflict, even assholes, “communism” isn’t heaven, it’s just a #KISS honest way to live. And it can maybe handle everything the current system handles, only better. Capitalism is a hack job, it hoards, it wastes, it burns people out. A communal society builds real wealth: time, beauty, knowledge, unpolluted air, clean water, and space to actually live.

And how do we get there? Not by magic. Not by seizing the TV stations and declaring victory. The revolution is already underway. But it’s compost, not dynamite. We’re building a soil layer thick enough for life to grow.

It starts by making more communists, by spreading the seed idea, that equality isn’t just desirable, it’s necessary. It grows when workers demand not just crumbs but real power, not reforms, but transformation. First they fight for better pay, then for control, and finally they realize the masters have no magic, no divine right – just theft, backed by violence and lies.

The change won’t come as a single event. It’s a long decay and regrowth – a shift from brittle control to living interdependence. The capitalist state will still try to crush this change when the time comes, but by then, it could be too late. Its legitimacy will have rotted away. People will already be walking, building the alternative paths.

In short:

I could be a Communist because the current system is slavery with marketing.

I could be a Communist because I believe in people, not profit.

I could be a Communist because the future can be communal, or there will be no future.

It’s not utopia. It’s not perfect. It’s just a path forward that doesn’t end in collapse, burnout, and brutal inequality. This isn’t a manifesto. It’s a spade in the soil. Time to dig.

We need to compost the spiky and the fluffy nasty

From hard walls to fluffy blocks – let’s compost the negative nastiness in our progressive spaces.

A reflection on toxic communication in radical spaces, and how to build something better.

In the 20th century, much of the nastiness came from the hard vertical left. Back then, control, ideology, and vanguardism created rigid hierarchies, enforced through forceful exclusion and dogma. In the 21st century, that same exclusion comes from the “fluffy” horizontal left, the #fashionista crew wrapped in progressive aesthetics. It’s still fear and control. It’s still the same mess. And it still needs composting.

Even in spaces that claim openness and justice, we see “common sense” pushing of gatekeeping, moral absolutism. From both ends, the old vertical hardliners and the new fluffy puritans, we’re still well stuck in cycles of not hearing each other. One of the hard problems of the current left/progressive paths is this intolerance and dogmatic nastiness dressed up in fluffy cloth. Historically, from the hard vertical left, but much more common today is from our “fluffy” #fashionista “progressive” crew and their pushing of postmodernist language games as #blocking.

It’s a real and persistent issue in left/progressive paths, we do all service by worshipping a #deathcult, so people are often “wrong” as this common sense worship is the normal, not the exception. It is a cycle where gatekeeping, moral absolutism, and social exclusion dominate on every side. But when this comes from the “fluffy” or “horizontal” side, it is even harder to talk about, as it’s too often masked as care or safety, but still ends up reinforcing fear and control.

Non-nasty communication would be rooted in trust, a touch of humility, and most importantly shared purpose, and could look like a presumption of good intent, default to assuming people are trying, even if they fail. Then we need to replace instant cancellation with curiosity, “What do you mean by that?” or “Can we unpack that together?” in more constipated language that works for some more academic people.

Yes we do need clear boundaries without exclusion, you can say “That’s not OK here” without blocking, shaming, or exiling. Encouraging dialogue before disengagement builds stronger communities than isolation does. Then in every step visible open process (#4opens Style).

In group process, clear decision-making, open archives, transparent moderation, and rotating responsibility make space for people to learn and grow instead of fear missteps. If this goes wrong, and it will, deep listening, slow speaking. Let things sit. Respond with reflection, not reflex. Allow pauses and silences; don’t rush to dominate with the “correct” take.

In the end, it’s best to see conflict as compost, not crisis. See disagreement as a chance to grow shared understanding, hold space for messy difference rather than rushing to resolution or punishment. A part of this is inviting language, use “we,” “let’s,” and questions more than commands or declarations. Say “I’m wondering if…” instead of “You’re wrong because…”

In short and sharp, what to do when people are “wrong”, treat people as comrades, not problems is a good first step. Communication should be generative, less about winning, more about creating together. #KISS we do need to compost this nasty mess, do you need a shovel #OMN

Then OK in the end you might end up hitting each other, but this should always be long down the process path, long down. Hope this helps 😉

Enclosure of self is deathcult worship in the era of #climatchaos

#deathcult / #geekproblem / #nothingnew

#Neoliberalism isn’t just an economic system, it’s a cult of self-enclosure. Its superpower? #stupidindividualism, turning people inward, away from shared life, into isolated fragments clicking, swiping, and scrolling through ruins. It disconnects us from collective being, and then sells the pieces back as “individual freedoms.” This isn’t an accident. It’s the plan, a trick of enclosure, take a concept of civic breakdown and turn it into a moral failing of the person, not the system. A classic #deathcult move.

Let’s call it what it is #stupidindividualism = the neoliberal condition of enclosure. A social operating system designed to lock us into self-referential survival while the commons burn.

We’ve all been forced into #stupidindividualism. The #dotcons enclose our attention. The gig economy encloses our labour. Even our friendships are enclosed in “encrypted” DMs, monetized by adtech. Public life? Gone, auctioned off to the highest bidder or locked behind paywalls.

We are encouraged to be good “idiots” in the ancient Greek sense – disengaged from collective power. This #deathcult under capitalism, is a feature, not a bug. They, the #nastyfew want “us” atomized, docile, and scrolling, not stepping away from the path to new norms. And so we rot in a swamp of aestheticized politics – “likes” over lives, vibes over values, empty radical branding over messy collective struggle.

Some symptoms of this sickness can be seen in commons destroyed: Libraries gutted, parks sold off, hospitals privatized. Nothing left to meet in. Social life enclosed: From Facebook groups to “creator economies,” all relations are branded and transactional. Fear replaces solidarity, precarity rewires our brains – everyone a competitor, every community a threat. Politics becomes content, no spaces for deliberation, only comment sections and algorithmic outrage. Under this path, “engagement” is a metric, not a practice. #stupidindividualism is the “normal” common sense path we currently walk down.

The left hasn’t escaped. We’re not immune. We’re infected. Too much of what passes for radicalism is just #stupidindividualism with better fonts. Buzzwords. Identity consumption. Internal drama cycles. Empty memes. Most leftist language itself has been enclosed into performative radicalism, saying the right things in the right tone to the right audience – but nothing changes. It’s a ritual, not resistance. Aesthetic replaces action: Solidarity becomes merch. Mutual aid becomes charity. “Revolution” becomes content marketing.

This is all the “common sense” #mainstreaming by another name. It’s simply #stupidindividualism on the left. And we can’t win if we keep playing by the #deathcult’s dogma. So how do we compost this? We grow living language from real ground. No more floating hashtags. No more semantic bubbles. Here’s the path, embed language in practice, political terms should come from mutual aid kitchens, picket lines, and assemblies – not Slack threads or Twitter feuds.

Don’t just “speak truth to power” – speak truth to each other, if we want to build a better world, we need collective life again. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s survival. We’re in a fight against a system that thrives on isolation. #Neoliberalism has turned us all into (stupid)individuals, and then blamed us for it.

Let’s be clear, the opposite of #stupidindividualism is not intellect, it’s interdependence. So let’s plant words in soil again. Let’s grow meaning from shared struggle. Let’s compost the #deathcult and sprout something real. On this path, just say no to self-enclosure. No to semantic drift. No to aesthetic radicals trapped in content loops. Instead, let’s get our hands dirty.