From my decades of real-world experience – especially in activism – I’ve found that self-professed #Postmodernists and Western #Buddhists have been some of the most useless and damaging people I’ve worked with. Not an exaggeration: I could probably count the genuinely good ones on one hand. This isn’t bitterness. It’s about composting a mess that has rotted for too long.
Important: This isn’t a call to lurch into the collapsing right-wing #shitheap either. It’s a call to stop adding to the mess, to pick up our shovels, and to get to work clearing space for new growth. Let’s not be prats about this, thanks.
The opening moment of the workshop on Methodological Strategies for Real-Life Theorising was unintentionally profound. A story of a seagull crieing above the glass façade of the Blavatnik School of Government – a building that stands as a temple to the #deathcult that shaped our lives for the last 40 years of #neoliberal change. In hindsight, that seagull metaphor may have been the wisest participant at the event.
The sessions that followed offered a painful reminder of just how entrenched and constipated academic political theory can be. Many of the speakers, well-meaning, no doubt, spoke in dense, self-referential language, seemingly unaware (or uninterested) in the world burning outside. We are living through accelerating #climatechaos, surging right-wing extremism, and widespread social fragmentation. Yet here, the main concern is career-building through opaque frameworks and method fetishism. One can’t help but wonder how many in the room truly believe they are doing good?
The crisis is deeper than any single workshop. The very career paths that brought these scholars here have been shaped, filtered, and “concreted” by 30 years of neoliberal funding models. The result is a form of political theorising that appears to want to find a way out, but only by squeezing itself through the tightest gaps in the #postmodern mess. And even then, only while clutching tightly to the privileges and assumptions granted by the current paths.
Constipated Language, Abstract Struggles
Throughout the first sessions, there was a recurring sense of people talking to themselves. Even the attempts to make theory “concrete” – to move into empirical territory – felt more like power grabs than inquiry. There was talk of “transient theory,” of “mid-level normative frameworks,” of “ethnographic insights”, but very little clarity on what any of this meant in real practical or political terms.
Instead of confronting the deeply ideological assumptions embedded in liberal academia, the speakers soft-stepped around them. One could sense them trying to smuggle ideology back into a discipline that’s been left hollow. The “heroic era of theory” is dead, and what we’re left with is a ritual performance of relevance. At one point, the liberal impulse to block discomforting inputs in public policy was laid bare. This is ethics as insulation, not action. There was repeated deference to “existing norms and frameworks,” – the very architecture of the #deathcult, now warmed up and served again as policy advice.
The Seagull Still Watches
By the end of the day, some fresh air drifted in. A few scraps of cloth were handed out to the otherwise naked theorists. There was genuine engagement with normative complexity. Questions like “what is mutable?” began to shift the conversation. “Engaged political philosophy” and talk of “normative judgments” began to inch the discussion closer to the ground.
The presentation on restitution, for instance, highlighted real political dilemmas. Who decides what gets returned, and why? Is it justice, diplomacy, or geo-political calculation? One question noted that giving back looted objects is not just about ethics, it’s about giving back the values they represent. But this was quickly hedged with talk of “choice.” Liberal hedging again. No one wanted to say: yes, do it, without compromise.
Even here, markets remained the baseline. The dominant “common sense” is still economic flow. Value is defined by trade, not meaning. Discrimination itself can to easily be reframed as a market distortion, another cost to be corrected, not a systemic condition to be fought. The anti-market perspective, grounded in actual social justice, in living memory, in reparative truth, is invisible to meany people until it becomes a threat. At that point, the strategy shifts to distraction and buying off. That’s the logic of #neoliberal containment.
From Political Theory to Political Theater
What we witnessed was not just a methodological workshop, but a staged performance of institutional survival. Theories were dressed up, displayed, but never walked out into the street. Real political agency remained absent. The political philosopher, once imagined as a public actor, now hides behind peer-reviewed paywalls, while the world asks different questions entirely.
Still, by the end, perhaps there were reasons for the seagull to hold off its stone throwing – for a while. A few voices showed signs of life. A few questions struck true. But it will take more than scraps of normative cloth to cover the nakedness of political philosophy today.
The event: Many political philosophers theorise not only for the sake of pure theory, but also because they want to convince citizens and policymakers to bring about changes in the real world.
Such policy-oriented research often draws on interdisciplinary methods, integrating empirical insights and normative and conceptual arguments. This, however, raises methodological challenges of its own. For example, how to deal with the fact that the social sciences are fragmented and different disciplines work with different paradigms and methodologies? How can philosophers, who bring their own normative assumptions openly to the table, deal with the – sometimes implicit – normativity that is also inherent in many other lines of research? What level of abstraction of normative arguments, eg basic normative theories or mid-level overlapping principles, should philosophers draw on when discussing with policymakers? And how to deal with the fact that in the current political climate in many countries, distrust towards “experts” also extends to philosophers? Workshop agenda
Day 1: Thursday 24 April 2025
Methodological Strategies for real-life theorising
Chair: Jonathan Wolff, Blavatinik School of Government
Liron Lavi, Bar-Ilan University and Nahshon Perez, Bar-Ilan University: Conceptual Concretization in Empirically Informed Political Theory: What Makes a Concept Applicable
Carmen E Pavel, King’s College London: Mid-Level Theories of Justice and Public Policy
Kian Mintz Woo, University College, Cork: Explicit Methodologies for Normative Evaluation in Public Policy
Theorising between values and cases
Chair: Daniel Halliday, University of Melbourne
Rouven Symank, Free University, Berlin: Integrating Ethnography with Political Theory in Policy-Oriented Research: Challenges and Insights from Cultural Restitution Debates
Florence Adams, University of Cambridge: Discrimination as an Object of Social Science
Erika Brandl, University of Bergen: Measuring the justice of architectural development policies:debates on temporal scopes and indicators in the Hillevåg plan
My notes on this event:
The seagull is perhaps a good metaphor for nature fighting back against the last 40 years of human #deathcult culture that this building is temple of.
The language is constipated, a growing feeling that these people are pissing funding and focus against the wall while the world burns from #climatechaos and hard right social breakdown.
I wonder how many people here think they are doing good?
The problem on this career path is that it has been shaped by #neoliberalism for the last 20 years, funding and status have both been ground through this mess, and now reflect it.
After the first session I feel they are trying to squeeze themself out of this post modernist mess. By going back to basics, but it’s so constipated it’s hard to see if there is any value in this.
Looking at them talk and answer questions, you can feel them being lost. It still feels like they are talking to themselves.
A power grab, by making theory concrete, to build empirical research. They dodge this by saying the theory is transient.
If this is a bios? They fix this by making the bios visible. They find this question hard to answer as its a root issue.
They are “soft” sneaking ideology back into the current dead Political Science and theory world they work in.
The heroic era of theory is challenged for making public policy. They argue that we should start from the existing norms and frameworks. This from the #deathcult we get wormed up #deathcult worship as policy. Mess. Of course liberal rights have priority in the end, “we must also include institutional facts”.
The seagulls at the start of this event might be the wisest one here. The rest have no cloths, and the language is so constipated that the smell is likely off putting for any real outreach that they need in the scrabbling for coverings to continue their careers.
The liberals start to talk about #blocking the inputs that make them uncomfortable. In ethical public policy making.
From a working insider view, the people doing this don’t have the skills or knowledge if we focus on philosophy and theory only.
Good question, what is given, what is mutable is very mutable. So the Liberal “common sense” is likely a strong #blocking on the path of the change we need.
“Engaged political philosophy” “normative judgments” as we go on they start to be more relevant. “where there is convergence and divergence”
The event starts naked and smelly but as it goes on the air clears at times and some scraps of cloth are provided.
Relevant information that is easily excessable,
The power in a committee is the appointment of the people sitting on the committee rather than the committee process it self. The answer to this is hesitant and bluff, and distaste to cover this.
A chair or witness roll is different in committees.
Why restitution, why now.
Liberal Justice
Reperatition is politics, not just ethical, geo politics and funding, based on former colonist will, is a tool for “ethical diplomacy”
Can any of these be seen as a reason not to do it. Don’t have an answer. Normative lessons.
When we give back objects that we value from our looting, we are giving back our values. We still chose.
My parents work is displayed in our #mainstreaming institutions, but these institutions are not interested in the objects, as they do not fit into there existing story’s and category. Subject archives will take them. But this is still shaping history.
Markets as the dominant “common sense” everything is economic flows. Value is defined by this.
Discrimination is contested with the hard shift to the right #DUI
Distortion in the market, function efficiently.
Discrimination is about greed, American greed, a moral dilemma. Liberal but not to liberal. Talk about the market path, let the market do its thing.
Markets aligned characteristics, money the logic of the #deathcult
As my work is anti market they can’t see any value, so put no resources and focus on the path in till it becomes a threat then distraction and buying off become the difficult paths.
Trump now is turning this neoliberalism around as discrimination. What is this, discrimination against nation states, rather than economics/market.
At the end the might be reasons for the seagull to hold off the stone throwing for a while.
#Mainstreaming talk about the internet generally completely misses the point, yep, it’s the FT so no surprise I suppose. The actual internet, the one we built before the takeover of the #dotcons, this is a culture of #4opens protocols, stitched together with moth-eaten mythologies and some messy traditions. It was never clean or pure, but it was ours.
What this guy in the article is describing isn’t the internet, it’s the #dotcons layer that’s been built on top of that original infrastructure. Worse, it’s very crap path that we helped build, by feeding it with our time, attention, and data. Yes, it’s a mess. But, the bigger problem is what we often do is add to this mess instead of composting it.
From “unstoppable slop” to “enshittification” to the idea of a “hostile internet”, all of these have explanatory power, but none really get to the root issues. The sickness isn’t just tech, it’s culture, warped by power and profit. What we’re living in now isn’t a broken system, it’s a deliberately built one. Designed not for us, but to extract from us. This #hostileinternet is not inevitable. It’s the result of a thousand bad decisions made by #deathcult tech and #VC backed greed, and not by accident but by design.
The FT piece ends up saying: “The internet makes us seem mad, always connected, always performing, always consuming – like streetcorner eccentrics amplified to global scale.” And yeah, it does feel like that. But that’s not the fault of the internet. It’s the fault of which internet we’ve chosen to feed. To fix this, we don’t need a new system. We need to remember the old one. Compost the current slop. Rebuild from the roots. Base it on native #4opens, community, and the culture that carried us before this #dotcons mess took over.
If you want your revolution to succeed, it’s a good to push and grow from mythos and traditions, and grow from shared histories. Yes, Marxism and European #anarchism are coming back into fashion as source code of radical politics. But if we are to actually achieve anything this time round, we need to see and act, in balance, a #KISS understanding that most of what they propose already existed in indigenous and non-Western cultures. Ideas like #mutualaid, communal land, anti-hierarchy, #dialectics – these aren’t Euro inventions. They were lived reality for societies built on relationships, protocols, obligations, stories, land.
The path that we so often miss in our activism is those indigenous systems were rooted in culture, not just politics. That’s why they could survive under centuries of attack from #colonialism and #capitalism. It wasn’t theory that held them together, it was the social infrastructure of caring.
Way too often our western left tries to reassemble this through ideology alone, in a culture already stripped of land, kinship, and tradition. That’s why left projects so often keep collapsing – #theory isn’t enough. You can’t build lasting community on politics without #relationalfabric. No story, no shared values, no “spiritual” grounding, and everything becomes a power game, a purity spiral, a mess of ego and disconnection.
Even where Marxism and Anarchism succeeded for a time: #CNTFAI, the #Zapatistas, the #USSR you can see that it was growing from existing cultural roots. The political theory sprouted from culture, it didn’t grow without it. And when that cultural roots got disrupted? So do the movement.
In meany ways, Marxists have dogmatically dismiss indigenous societies as primitive, when they already lived what meany of the western radicals dreamed of. That’s the core paradox, Maximists too often wants what they ignore. They reach for communal life while scorning the few people who still kinda live it. #Anarchism tends to follow the same path, beautiful ideas, but no soil to grow in.
You want your revolution? Start with compost. The #4opens, land, kinship, accountability, shared story. Don’t fight the #deathcult with manifestos, root your tech and your politics in #livingculture. We don’t need more theory. To balance the current mess, we need to remember what we already knew.
The #OMN View – The Dogma of Anti-Dogma: Rainbow Gatherings
The #blocking of current action, the constant stalls, confusion, and fragmentation, has a lot to do with the mess our use of language makes. And the deeper issue is how this messy language feeds back into our culture, which then loops back to make the language even murkier. It’s a feedback loop that clouds meaning, erodes trust, and paralyses collective action.
The last 40 years of postmodernism and neoliberalism have made this worse. #Postmodernism chipped away at the idea of shared reality, leaving us with endless interpretation and “personal truths.” #Neoliberalism, on the other hand, commodified everything, including language itself, into marketing, spin, and #PR. Together, we have hollowed out words like “community,” “freedom,” and even “change,” to the point that we barely recognize what they mean any more.
Take “mutual aid” for example, a term grounded in deep solidarity and reciprocal responsibility. Now, on both #dotcons and #openweb platforms, it gets reduced to casual crowdfunding and anonymous asks, with little relational context. Not bad, but far from what it could and needs to be.
If we want affinity-based action to work, if we want people to come together and trust and act together, then we have to compost this mess. And the way to do that might be surprisingly simple #KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid, not stupid as in naive, but stupid as in clear.
We need to reclaim simple language that carries shared meaning. This is exactly what we’re trying to seed with the positive side of the #hashtag story. Hashtags act as anchors in this storm of abstraction. They cut through noise, bring us back to the root meaning, and allow collective orientation without needing corporate gatekeepers or institutional filters.
Think:
#4opens — a shorthand for open code, open data, open governance, open standards.
#techshit — composting the mess, not throwing it away.
#nothingnew — slowing tech churn, reclaiming meaningful pace and paths.
Each of these tags points to deeper, shared narratives that are simple, but not simplistic. They invite action, not confusion. Composting the abstraction, regrow clarity, reclaim trust paths in both tech and social spaces. Speak simply, act clearly, hashtag wisely with intention.
On this working path, It is important for the progressives and radicals to come together and focus on the real issues and challenges facing society, rather than fighting among ourselves. Finding this balance between being “nice” and being “nasty” is key to being effective in bringing about any lasting social change.
The #hashtags embody a story and worldview rooted in a progressive and critical perspective on technology and society. They highlight the destructive impact of neoliberalism (#deathcult) and consumer capitalism (#fashernista) on our shared lives, while promoting the original ideals of the World Wide Web and early internet culture (#openweb).
The #closedweb critiques the for-profit internet and its harmful social consequences, while #4opens advocates for transparency, collaboration, and open-source principles in tech development.
The #geekproblem tag draws attention to a cultural tendency in tech: where geeks, absorbed in their tools and logic, overlook the broader social effects of their creations. This feeds into #techshit, where layers of unnecessary complexity pile up, further distancing people from tech’s social roots. Meanwhile, #encryptionists critiques the knee-jerk reaction that “more encryption” is always the answer, reinforcing control and scarcity, rather than liberating people and community.
Together, hashtags tell a coherent and powerful story. They call for a more humane, collaborative, and transparent approach to both technology and society.
#nothingnew asks whether constant innovation is the right path — or if we need to slow down and improve what already works.
#techchurn names the cycle of flashy, redundant tech that fails to solve core issues.
#OMN and #indymediaback point toward an Open Media Network — and a revival of the radical, decentralized media that once rivalled corporate media on the early web.
#OGB stands for Open Governance Body, an invitation to practice grassroots, transparent, community-led decision-making.
It’s an ambitious but needed path and goal, to build and grow social tech that “fails well”, meaning they fail in a way that can be fixed by the people, through trust and collective action, not closed-source patches and corporate updates. The #OMN’s focus is human-first. Tech comes second, as a mediator, a tool, not the destination.
Yes, the #geekproblem is real. Technical expertise becomes a gatekeeping mechanism. But tech can also empower, if we design for simplicity, accessibility, and community-first paths and values. The only working path is simple, trust-based, and human. That’s why we keep coming back to #KISS.
Why haven’t we been doing this for the last 10 Years? Over the past decade, we’ve lived in a state of quiet paralysis. Climate change, ecological collapse, technological overreach, all of it loomed. And instead of digging in, we froze. Well-meaning people chose fear over action. Understandably. But fear is a poor foundation for building anything sustainable.
We’re not on this site to only blame – we’re here to compost. The problem? We stopped critiquing. We stopped examining the tools in our hands. Not only that, but we bought into the illusion that #NGO paths and tech would save us. That shiny apps and startup culture could greenwash a better future. And when the results disappointed, we turned inward, stopped questioning, and left things to rot.
But what if that rot could be composted? By using the #4opens – open data, open code, open standards for open governance, we have a practical framework to call out and compost the layers of #techshit that have built up. Tech that divides us, tech that distracts us, tech that damages the planet and calls it progress. Yes, like gardening, composting takes time. It smells at first. It’s messy. But give it care, and you get soil. Soil to plant better ideas in. Soil for hope.
One of the reasons we haven’t made progress is the #geekproblem, a narrow slice of technically-minded culture made up of (stupid)individuals, which so far have dominated the design and direction of our tools. They, often, mean well. But in their obsession with technical elegance and “solutions,” they’ve sidelined the social and the ecological. What’s left is a brittle, sterile infrastructure, constantly churning out newness without any substance.
Meanwhile, #stupidindividualism has flourished, encouraged by #dotcons social media systems built for engagement, not connection. These silos encourage performance over solidarity, branding over community, and endless scrolling over doing. We’ve all felt it.
And most activist groups, instead of resisting this tide, drank the #NGO poison, chased funding, watering down their goals, professionalizing their resistance until it became another logo in a funding application. We’ve lost a decade to fear, distraction, and capture. But it’s maybe not too late.
We have the tools, in the #ActivityPub based #Fediverse. We have the frameworks, the #4opens can guide us to rebuild with transparency, collaboration, and care. The hashtags like #geekproblem, #techshit, #nothingnew, and #OMN give us a shared vocabulary for critique and regeneration. They point to a web where people, not platforms, hold power, and where technology serves life, not control. Let’s stop being afraid to critique. Let’s stop outsourcing responsibility and get on with composting.
Because that’s where the soil of a better path will come from.
All the #OMN projects I’ve worked on over the years, from #OGB to #indymediaback, are not directly about social change. They are about creating the possibility of social change. A subtle, but critical difference.
We don’t claim to have the answers. What we do offer are tools, networks, and processes that make it easier for people to imagine that the world can be different, and then help them to take the first step.
Yet still, here’s the mess that keeps being pushed over us. We are told this work is “too high up the stack,” “too fuzzy,” or “too political.” But in reality, the same topics and themes do receive #NGO funding, just safely sanitized within the logic of the #deathcult. In this, the “shadow” keeps getting funded, but the light source is ignored.
When we say “the world can be different,” we’re not talking about abstract theory. We mean literally:
Media that people control from the grassroots up
Governance that isn’t locked behind elitist gates
A web that grows through trust not platforms
Protocols that reflect values, not just efficiency
But the funding, even in the so-called ‘alternative’ spaces, is trapped in a conservative loop. People working in these orgs are either too captured by their own #geekproblem funding logic, or too afraid to support anything that might really challenge their place in the status quo, by threatening to end the funding flows they live in.
Some of the real replies to the over 20 funding applications I have put in for the last ten years: “This kind of effort is very hard to seek grants for…” “I don’t have an obvious candidate for you to go to, either.” What these polite deferrals mask is a structural failure of imagination. The fear of change is so strong that even funders tasked with enabling alternatives end up only supporting work that conforms to existing institutional logics and barely deviates in meaningful ways from the normal #mainstreaming paths.
So, where does that leave those of us pushing for a real #openweb reboot? We get silence or slow-walked rejections. We burn out or pivot to “safer” projects. Or worst of all, we get absorbed by the very forces we wanted to challenge. And look, maybe that’s the plan. Maybe co-option is the endgame for the #openweb: a slick, tamed version of rebellion, friendly enough for NGOs and palatable to #EU bureaucrats.
But that’s not our plan. Not the plan we’ve been composting all these years. The challenge:
Funders: If you want the future to be different, stop only funding imitation’s, fund the real thing, step outside the safety of compliance. Trust radical imaginations.
Builders: If you’re still holding the compost shovel, don’t drop it. The real garden will grow, but only if we stop watering the plastic plants.
Everyone else, demand more. Not just better bling, but better foundations.
We don’t need more advice, we do need courage. The #openweb is not dead, but it is at risk of becoming another façade unless we build the possibility of real change into its #rebooting core.
People are celebrating that Trump and the new right are tearing down the neoliberal #deathcult consensus. And to be fair, they’re right, Trump’s movement is smashing the status quo. But there is an easy to see problem, it’s not being replaced with anything better. It’s just more stinking shit, only now it’s wrapped in authoritarian aesthetics and crypto-gold-rush dreams. This is the “new” mess being pushed by the different #nastyfew.
Wannabe king, fascist
This regime change without a roadmap is the end of neoliberalism, and good riddances to that, but this change is not a “nice” step toward justice, but a corporate free-for-all masked in anti-elite smoke and mirrors. Trump project isn’t building anything. It’s the looting of the ruins.
We have already suffered through the 40 years of neoliberal breaking government to sell it off. What many still don’t understand is that neoliberalism doesn’t just passively fail, it actively sabotaged. For people who pine for this vanishing mess, let’s remind you that if you elect neoliberals, they will work tirelessly to make your government services worse. Why? Because good public services threaten private profit. This is the history of the last 40 years:
Defund and sabotage public services, transit, healthcare, education.
Add layers of bureaucracy to make them inefficient and annoying to use.
Watch public trust erode as services collapse.
Claim privatization is the only solution, and sell it off to friends and donors.
The result? A hollowed-out state, where private companies profit off pain, and public goods are rebranded as luxuries. This is what we voted for with Starmer’s labour coup in the UK. This isn’t mismanagement, it’s strategy.
But Trump, and likely Farage, if we vote for him to replace Starmer, goes a step further. They’re not just running the neoliberal script, the rewriting it with a real estate mogul’s pen, driven by a dystopian vision of climate opportunism. Want proof? Look at the growing obsession on the American right with Canada and Greenland. Yes, Greenland. It’s not simply a joke, it’s a climate gold rush. As the Arctic melts, they see land, water, and new frontiers. The kids we put in charge who dream of being kings are buying into collapse like its beachfront property.
Prince of nasty, fuckwittery
Trumpism is what happens when the neoliberal state collapses under its own mess and contradictions, and instead of building something new, it hands the keys to a cartel of extractive fantasists. They don’t deny climate change anymore. They’re planning to capitalize on it.
The is currently no plan, no future on the current path. This new right-wing movement isn’t even pretending to govern. There’s no vision beyond seizing land, eroding rights, and cutting deals. They’re not here to fix the climate. They’re here to survive it better than you, and leave you and your kids dieing in the mess.
We need to be absolutely clear about this, government services don’t have to be slow and bureaucratic. That’s a choice. A bad one. We can build public systems that are efficient, trustworthy, and just. But to do this, we need to reject the current “common sense” neoliberal decay and right-wing collapse profiteering.
These men featured here are all #fuckwits, we simply can’t let the #nastyfew define the on rushing era of collapse. A first step away from this mess is in saying out load that the hard shift to the right isn’t the antidote to neoliberalism, its final form, stripped of illusion and fully weaponized. And the answer to this isn’t hiding from the collapse, it’s composting the mess, we need a shovels #OMN
Let’s get this out of the way, most new tech projects are pointless. That’s not an insult, it’s a cultural symptom. People are pushing things not because they’re useful, but because they can. And when every shovel is used to dig holes in sand, we’re not building anything, we’re flailing.
From this experience, let’s build culture, not just code, because here’s the hard truth, we’re losing the reboot of the #openweb by failing to nurture it. Yes, #mainstreaming people are walking back in after the #dotcons burned their fingers, but our “welcome mat” is a mess, no clarity, no cultural grounding, no visible shovels. So it’s 3 steps forward, 2 steps back, exhausting, but better than nothing, but only in the end if we compost the shit to a healthy path.
There is an avalanche coming. A flood of scared, angry, confused people. And without grounded trust and process, we’ll get washed out by the noise. Let’s be real:
The left is built on hope and trust-based cooperation.
The right is built on fear and control.
We live in a world so muddied that it’s hard to tell the difference. That’s why we must be clear, transparent, and intentional. Without that, people can’t tell what’s real.
To the people parroting style and the mess in our community, I’ve been talking with these people for years. Some I know in person. Some in code, threads, chats, some in intention. And yeah, you could say I’ve also been “talking at” them at times, when you’re trying to talk from under a pile of #techshit, your voice gets garbled.
Can we talk usefully about these groups? If we can’t, then we’re not doing community, we’re doing individualism, which is what the #deathcult feeds on. So here’s the invitation: Start discussing structure, stop silencing style and start composting confusion. Let’s bring the shovels, the mess is real, but so is the soil we can grow from.
It’s pastime more people raised their heads, the Council on Foreign Relations (#CFR), the think tank of the U.S. political establishment, just published a new statement calling for what they call “Climate Realism.”
1.5°C Is Dead – And they admit it, to their credit, CFR doesn’t sugarcoat the situation. They finally acknowledge that the international climate target of limiting warming to 1.5°C is officially dead. The new “realistic” trajectory? 3°C or higher by the end of this century, if not sooner. This isn’t just academic: 3°C means crop failures, mass displacement, geopolitical chaos, collapsing ecosystems, and runaway feedback loops. It’s climate breakdown, not “climate change.”
The #geekproblem tech fix of geoengineering is Plan A to the looming catastrophe, not degrowth, not ending fossil fuel subsidies, not climate justice or ecological transition. They want massive investment in geoengineering, particularly solar radiation management (SRM), basically spraying particles into the stratosphere to dim the sun. Yes, they’re proposing that we hack the planet to protect global capitalism. All while keeping the mess of extraction and inequality running at full speed.
They don’t say anything about system change, their “realism” is not anything to do with reducing global consumption, transitioning away from endless economic growth, or tackling the structural roots of climate collapse.
On this “common sense” #mainstreaming path we are rushing down, the is no interest in real solutions, because real solutions threaten the economic order they live in. They don’t touch on basic climate justice because justice is incompatible with on going imperial hegemony. They don’t mention degrowth because that would shake the foundations of capitalistic economics. No mention of capitalism, it’s invisible to them, because they are capitalism, thus they are #blind to this.
This is the new fascist #mainstreaming – A doctrine of U.S. climate power, the statement frames climate breakdown as a national security issue, a geopolitical weapon to be wielded by the U.S. state. Let’s be very clear, this isn’t about saving the planet. It’s about maintaining U.S. dominance in a rapidly destabilizing world.
What they do is debunk four liberal “climate fallacies”:
Global targets are achievable – Not any more.
China and the Global South are the key battlegrounds.
Climate risks are manageable – They admit this is fantasy.
Clean energy is a win-win for the U.S. – Nope. China leads. The U.S. is lagging behind.
Instead, they push a doctrine of planning for collapse with adaptation, disaster readiness, and securing “fiscal room” for emergency responses. Investing in competitive clean tech, not for domestic transition, but to outcompete China in global markets. Leading catastrophic risk mitigation, geoengineering is their “break glass in case of emergency” option. They even float the idea of using economic and military pressure to force other nations to cut emissions.
Climate deterrence is going to be the New Cold War. #CFR now sees climate as a deterrence issue, like nuclear weapons, only with carbon. That’s their vision: a future where the U.S. uses its technological and military edge to impose climate stability through force. This is climate realism in the mess making logic of empire, don’t change course, double down on control.
We are on a path straight to hell, with eyes wide open. This should come as no surprise, ofter the last 20 years of mess building, CFR’s plan is in no way surprising. It’s the logical next step for a system that can’t imagine anything beyond growth, extraction, and domination. In their world, collapse is a management problem, not a moral one.
We should be clear, this is a death march. It’s not “realism”, it’s resignation dressed up as pragmatism. And if we follow them, we’ll arrive exactly where they’re headed, hell, but orderly. We have worshipped this #deathcult for too long.
The new right’s obsession with Greenland and Canada’s north isn’t some fringe fantasy, it’s real estate logic, twisted through a lens of empire and extraction. When you zoom out and frame it through the lens of #climatechaos, it’s chillingly obvious, the Arctic is melting, and they see land, not crisis.
That AlphaGeo link paints the picture, climate-driven migration, shifting growing zones, and emerging “climate havens” aren’t theoretical, they’re data-driven land grabs in progress. And the political ambition to dominate those spaces? That’s the should now be more obvious to us all.
It’s a gold rush for the apocalypse, a final frontier for the capitalist imagination. They aren’t trying to save anything; they’re re-positioning to rule what’s left. And yes, it’s a children-who-want-to-be-kings fantasy: Trump-esque thinking where climate collapse becomes opportunity, borders become walls, and “winning” means inheriting a lifeboat while others drown.
This isn’t climate denial anymore, it’s climate opportunism. That’s why adaptation can’t just be technical, it has to be political. If we don’t shape the future, they are carving it up in plain sight.
From where I’m standing, a lot of people are being absolute prats when it comes to social and technological issues. That should be obvious… but clearly, it’s not. We’ve got two basic paths here:
#Block everything you don’t like. Predictably, this just creates more prat-ish behaviour and pushes us all deeper into toxic bubbles.
Ask questions. Grow. Listen. Respond. This reduces prat-ish behaviour – over time, maybe even composts it into something useful.
Now, in the era of #stupidindividualism, which path do you think most people are taking? Yeah. That one. If you’re blocking conversations that challenge you, you’re still kneeling at the altar of the #deathcult. Look up. You’re making a mess of social technology.
“Get off your knees” comes to mind, stop worshipping the #deathcult of neoliberalism, salted with postmodernism. These ideologies have poisoned our communities by turning freedom into isolation and choice into greed. I’m all for freedom, yes, you can choose to be a prat. But I reserve the freedom to call that behaviour toxic and self-destructive. What you do with that communication is up to you, just don’t pretend that #blocking it is some kind of moral high ground.
As Thalia Campbell rightly says, sometimes the best path is just to kindly correct, share info, or talk things through face-to-face. Most of this online prat-ness wouldn’t survive a real conversation, it’s bloated on anonymity, context collapse, and dopamine-fuelled feedback loops.
Yes, what meany people do now is a mess, but mess makes good compost, compost builds soil, soil feeds the common good. And talking about “common sense” is just a way of stirring that compost.
But here’s the mess makeing: we keep repeating the same shit, and instead of composting, we leave it to fester. Capitalism, rooted in self-interested greed, claims to serve the common good. But on the fundamentalist path we have been on for 40 years, it’s clearly failing. War. Growing economic divides. Visible #climatechaos. Poisoned ecosystems and communities.
We can’t survive, or flourish, in a society based on greed. That’s just a simple #KISS message. And neoliberalism, still much of our #mainstreming “common sense”, is nothing but extreme capitalism. It’s the purest form of the #deathcult. It’s eating us alive. Please talk about this.
The #dotcons we have been building our lives in for the last 20 years are undiluted deathcult, surveillance capitalism wrapped in shiny UX. The #openweb? Often like herding cats. And scratch the surface, and yes, sometimes you find the #deathcult there too. But we can’t keep going down this path. We need to stop pushing #mainstreaming agendas that lead us back into the same poisoned mess. That path is BAD. It’s ending in ruin.
We’ve got to try, seriously try, to make things better. Not perfect. Not flashy. Just better.
And that means less prat-ing about. More compost. More care. More common good.
The #4opens is a completely obverse social restating of the #FOSS development model — but with a critical edition: The return of #openprocess, something we’ve lost over the last 10 years due to the shift from public email archives to our reliance on encrypted chat.
With this in mind, what is still #blocking the #openweb reboot? One thing I’ve learned from the last five years of this reboot is this: The #geekproblem is inadequate for the scale of change and challenge we face. Currently, the #geekproblem is HARD #blocking, obstructing both, funding, and tech direction. Think: #NLNet, #NGIZero, #SummerOfProtocols, #InvestInOpen — they say the right words, have potential, but are actually #blindly caught in a loop of the same limiting #blocking patterns.
This is why we need activism, this can be #spiky, sometimes all it takes Is a rock or a stick. Think of Greek shepherd dogs in the mountains — they come at you like wolves. But just bending down to pick up a rock or stick? They back off. No violence. Just clarity and intention. Think of the #4opens like this when facing #mainstreaming, suddenly, it starts to make sense.
Nuts and nutters, Yes — you’re right, this can sound like blinded ideology. But remember: Humans are meaning-creating creatures. One word for that is ideology — there are others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synonym
If we can compost this mess, that’s a big if, will the #OMN Work? Simple answer: Yes. Complex answer: No. My answer to that riddle? We find the complex by implementing the simple. That’s the #KISS principle in action. Walk the simple path, we discover our way through the complex path by implementing and walking the simple one #KISS.
Most mainstream agendas are pointless. Why? Because they’re built on “common sense” — Which today often just means #deathcult worship. Something to keep in mind… whenever you’re doing anything that matters. Hope this slight poetry piece helps. One thing I keep saying, please don’t be a prat, thanks.
Almost all our posting in the #openweb and in the #dotcons in response to #mainstreaming news is noise. It’s reactive, fragmented, performative. We scroll, we rage, we boost, we dunk, but we don’t build. Sometimes, someone posts something thoughtful, something deep, meaningful. But it vanishes in the churn. The system is designed this way.
Even on our #openweb, where we have more autonomy, we are mirroring this spectacle path, feeding it attention, reposting its narratives, amplifying its framing. In the mess of this world, our timelines become echo chambers of secondhand despair and outrage. In short, we’re still speaking their language, on their terms, with our tools.
Why? Because we haven’t (re)built a place for real signal yet. The #OMN (Open Media Network), is a push to shift this dynamic. It’s not about broadcasting noise slightly more ethically. It’s about creating new spaces entirely, where the roots of stories matter more than the spin, where the focus is on shared compost rather than hot takes, where people and community are producers, and where signal isn’t just a flash, but an ongoing process.
The current state of the web, especially under the domination of the #dotcons, is colonized communication. It rewards (stupid)individualism, immediacy, virality. It buries context, nuance, history. The structure #blocks liberation because it’s built to sell alienation back to us, one like or scroll, one click at a time.
Even the current #openweb reboot, for all its potential, reproduces these patterns, because we carry them with us. We don’t just need alternatives in name, we need alternative cultures, processes, and values. We need to compost the mess, the #techshit, and grow new paths from the decay. That’s what the #OMN is seeded to do.
But let’s be honest, we’re not there yet. And we won’t get there unless we start collectively focusing on building signal, not just yelling about the noise. The tools need to be #KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), the governance needs to be transparent, trust-based, and the tech has to get out of the way, not be the centre. This requires stepping away from the #geekproblem, the cult of control, complexity, and abstraction, and towards living, messy, grassroots cultures that prioritize access, action, and accountability.
The mainstream is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. That collapse is not the revolution. What grows next is.
Take media coverage of protests as an example. It’s always framed through the lens of disruption and spectacle, “violent clashes,” “unrest,” “inconvenience to commuters” rather than the systemic injustices that birthed the protest in the first place. The message from the #mainstreaming is clear: “Why can’t you express your anger in a way that’s easier for us to ignore?” This is not journalism, it’s narrative policing. It flattens struggle into caricature and erases the causes: the exploitation, the dispossession, the broken promises. This is normal when we have media infrastructure of our own. Without projects like #indymediaback to hold space for grounded, first-voice storytelling, all we get is the echo of power describing its own reflection.
