Hamish Campbell an #openweb organic intellectual and technologist
#fediverse is an accidental #openweb reboot – largely driven by the #fashionistas. Which means – it’s like herding cats – hard to move, hard to align, not a bad thing, not a good thing – just the reality.
If we want to move beyond the mess, one path is #OGB – grassroots, #DIY, producer-led governance.
If not, then we live (and die) with the chaos. And do what we can to stop people bowing down to the #deathcult. Because even holding that line matters, if we want to keep the #openweb alive.
#stupidindividualism a full ideology with the last 40 years of #neoliberalism and a part of the liberal 20th century consensus. So it’s a strong #BLOCK
Some ideas:
* Every day, naming of the current “common sense” as worshipping the #deathcult is both true and useful in making #mainstreming uncomfortable.
* The pushing of simple #KISS ideas like #openweb vs #closedweb and #4opens as a POWERFUL way to JUDGE and compost #techcrap to mediate the #techchurn
* Group use of hashtags is the organizing tool.
There is an idea that on the “fluffy” left, we must be “nice” to get people involved in social change/challenge. There is an idea in the “spiky” left that we need to be nasty to be affective in social change/challenge.
Both are TRUE, it’s the balance that is important.
What is a CLEAR left fail is spending too much time fighting inside the left over this balance.
#BLOCKING #stupidindividualism and worshipping the #deathcult all push this fight, please don’t be a PRAT on this subject.
The problem:
The nice moral majority, our liberal friends, is that they still have not excepted that the system they try to PUSH is broken. It’s pastime for change so holding onto our current system is NOT helping, their “common sense” is the problem we need to be fighting as well as the far right.
United we stand, divided we fall – we are falling
We need to call pointless things pointless in the era of #climatechaos when most people are on their knees worshipping the #deathcult
If you feel fear at this idea, then your head is bowed, #fashernistas get off your knees and call pointless things out. Actively use the #4opens as a shovel, there are piles of #techshit that needs to be composted. In the era of #climatechaos most people are on their knees worshipping the #deathcult
All thinking is critique, if you aren’t looking at faults, you are likely not looking at the thing at all. Don’t be afraid, use the #4opens take up gardening the compost to plant the seeds of hope in the era of #climatechaos
Lift your head and look, lift your shovel, dig and plant.
It’s encouraging that more people are questioning whether we really need another new tech project. The truth is that most new projects are unnecessary. They solve imaginary problems, reinvent existing tools, or add to the growing pile of #techshit.
Before building anything, do a #4opens review. Ask simple questions: Is it open? Does it strengthen the commons? Does it distribute power? Does it solve a real social problem? Then publish that review. Let’s build a culture where communities evaluate technology together instead of chasing novelty. We need to do better.
The last decade of #techchurn has buried us under mountains of abandoned apps, duplicated projects and half-finished platforms. This isn’t just a technical problem; it’s a social one. Years of #mainstreaming have stripped away social purpose, while endless reinvention has consumed the time and energy that could have gone into maintaining and improving what already worked.
Some of this mess needs to be composted, not everything should be saved. The useful ideas, working code and lived experience should be recovered and reused. The rest can decompose into fertile ground for building something more humane.
From a grassroots perspective, one of our biggest problems is that many of the alternatives we once had have been hollowed out. Community media, social centres, cooperative technology and radical organising didn’t disappear because they failed completely. Many were absorbed, professionalised or defunded by the #NGO world, turned into projects for #fashernistas, or simply worn down by forty years of #deathcult thinking disguised as “common sense”.
That history matters. Many people wonder why motivation feels so low today. Part of the answer is that previous generations experienced real alternatives. Imperfect, often messy, but real. Anarchist projects, ecological movements, cooperative media, community technology and socialist experiments created spaces where people could participate rather than simply consume.
Most of those spaces have been dismantled, enclosed or forgotten. So let’s stop pretending we have to invent everything from scratch. Let’s recover what worked. Let’s learn from what failed. Let’s reboot the best of those traditions using federated, #4opens infrastructure like the #Fediverse and #OMN. Not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as the foundation for new experiments rooted in today’s reality.
Innovation isn’t about endless novelty, it’s about carrying forward what has lasting value. That’s the path beyond #techchurn.
In protest camps, squats, rainbow gatherings, akt-tech the is a long history of “liberals” pushing in with “common sense” agenda to distroy working alternatives. Our “liberals” have little understanding of the damage they do when this happens, for them this disstruction simply proves the alt’s are NOT posspable and thus their common sense is reinforced and the disstruction feeds back this “common sense”.
Worshiping the #deathcult in the era of #climatechaos the #OGB mediates this.
Worth a read to see the issue of feeding off the state and the VC poison that shapes the #fashernista ploughing over grassroots by the #deathcult These people are adding to the #techshit and shifting the focus to pointlessness, I have seen no good outcomes from their work.
But they were “our” people at one time, our old friends in activism took the heathy internal stresses that were braking projects like #indymedia to feed a #fashernista vampire class, to built careers feeding on and draining grassroots corpus for 20 years.
It’s not a good look, but people like these are the gatekeepers you talk to when you talk to “power” #indymediaback
Good to look at data and metadata for what it is, social glue that holds society together.
Our #deathcult worship separates and atomise people, as does privacy and security coded by the #geekproblem
Take a moment to step back, our contemporary coding is shaping https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberalism
It’s obviously true that society/ecology is sick from this blinded worship.
From this dogmatic liberalism, one thried is our society’s moving to corporate socialism. That is “law” and norms are shaped to value a tiny number of the nastiest people at the “top”.
Data and metadata is privatised, increasingly “National socialism” is the “common sense” #mainstreaming we code for and agenst.
To address this #geekproblem some of us need to step away and code outside “liberalism” and not in reaction to fascism.
#OMN #OGB #indymediaback are #openweb native projects.
A. We compost the current tech shitpile by #4opens to weed out 90% of the crap so as a first step we only have to work through the 10% then we are trying projects like #OGB and #OMN to work base on trust links to sift this last down to 1% then it’s human to human scale where we can build links/community’s out wider.
I think we have a good first step, if we can move the projects past the current #blocking
Especially if you want tech hours on it, at the moment.
Because there are folks there looking for a project to contribute to, but they aren’t always sure how to contribute.
A. Not how protest camps or squats, or hippy gathering happens. They are grassroots #DIY were people “just know” what to do because it has to be done to create the “world” around them.
Here you are describing the #geekproblem as a path out of the “problem” am addressing. Protest camps, squats and hippy gatherings all happen in the “real world” and are made by “real people” so “geeks” could/need to do all of them gives you an idea where the “problem” is 🙂
Q. Possibly even put the bite sized chunks into a toot and make it an appeal for help. Because yes we do have issues in the tech community with ignoring the negativity but sometimes folks will make grabby hands for the chance to do something positive, even a tiny thing to move a project forward.
A. have been working on this for 20 years, we can’t “solve” this problem from “inside” the problem. Change/change is needed from meany people to shift the #blocking culture. Am one voice, it requires a community, yes the are tools #4opens #OGB #OMN etc are useful. If the chicken and egg “problem” can be mediated.
“All code is ideology solidified into action – most contemporary code is capitalism”
You and your wider community can take the #4opens and judge codeing projects, thus discard 90% of them. The remaining 10% will have obvious holes that then people can focus on, examples are the projects I push. By doing this, building up and widening our “culture” we can focus on the 1% that is really important. From this we change the world as default, and likely our nature. Of course, it’s not this simple and challenge/change can easily be negative. It’s this or #deathcult
Q. OK, so consider that some geeks may not see how they can contribute, it could be background, it could be they haven’t had much of an opportunity to interact with the real world of protest.
We need to open the door both ways. Not just make tech more accessible to folks outside tech, but to figure out how to open the door so that techies can start to learn how they can help.
I think it’s a bit like pebbles on a mountain, small steps then we can build on that and make larger momentum.
A. metaphors are the precursor of action, what is needed is a group of people to take action – this is how every protest camp, squat or hippy gathering starts.
We have the metaphors, we have some actions (#4opens process is easy) what we are lacking is groups of people.
We have a soft social problem, NOT a hard codeing problem.
Urgency is always here, the spiky hashtags are there to find these groups. Use them or lose them.
Q. I think that’s something you can build on.
A. “not how protest camps or squats, or hippy gathering happens. They are grassroots #DIY where people “just know” what to do because it has to be done to create the “world” around them.”
The is a boring circal, The is a “I” “you” issue that surprisingly happens less in the above world. On the web in the context of meany of the people I am talking to, I call this #stupidindividualism this hashtag expresses the boring circal.
We can persuade people to our point of view, but it does take energy to do so. Most people don’t come up against life endangering adversity, so it’s hard for them to see the issue. We are still wired to see immediate danger rather than what could be seen as existential danger to life.
A. its a cultural problem, how are cultures created is maybe usefully to look at.
How to do affective change/challenge this is a long history of this http://visionon.tv
Yet I still have an immense amount of privilege. Refugees are harmed way more by the edges of society and law than I am. But mainstream folks see people at the edges as a threat.
Basic stuff – use it or lose it #OMN
A. Getting across the channel was an adventure https://youtu.be/gHpyuw8evBM
Now am starting to get impotently angry with the London boating community as it’s just not here any more and the boats are all full of fearfull hipsters. Kinda expected this but still kinda annoying. Way to meany “boaters” doing crap mooring and leaving piles of trash everywhere…
I left on my boat to get away from it 5 years ago, I arrive back to find it everywhere. Not surprising but kinda hard.
Q. I’m not familiar with the boating world, but my guess would be that as houses become impossible to buy and almost impossible to rent – especially in places like London – more people may be trying to live on the water instead. Free from a landlord.
A. yes the aspiring classes were sold this in meany #mainstreaming articals over the last 5 years. BUT living on a boat is NOT living in a flat… You need a community to be a part of to live on a boat with out this, non boaty people end up miserable poring money down the drain and then sinking when the boat is left empty after a few months of winter.
Its been like this the last few years, xmus is the time of huge run of boat breakins, Both the boats behind me are empty, one of the boats In front has a non comungative hipster types the other is empty. Likely 2/3 of the boats I have moored up next too the last month have been empty. Meany of the rest have fresh faced or scared hipsters.
London boating has not only lost its community, swompted and pushed out of town, but it’s now a slow train reck of abondond to decay dreams.
On a positive side the “policeman” of the waterways #CRT are incompetent, this slows their neo-liberalism based privisation of the remaining inland commons. And the is a relatively affective grassroot’ish counter force in #NBTA who “react” to slow/mediate the privatisation.
BUT this slowing might not survive the inrush of non boaty types who won’t cheap flats on water and happy go with the #CRT agenda as then they can pay to keep their boats static to get the relatively cheap flats on water they desire.
CRT will continue pushing out vagabond boaters by selling off the mooring spots and closeing stretches of canal by development. More “common sense” restrictions are on the way, the community to push back is scattering and srinking.
The #deathcult is killing one more of our few remaining commons.
The mess we need to compost is that the verticals are unthinking in their hierarchies, which turns the “value” of horizontals into a negative thing. Meanwhile, the horizontals despise the “power” plays of the verticals and take every measure to block their outcomes.
The world, however is one of balance. Both perspectives have roles and shifting values depending on the problems we collectively need to address. For those pushing #BLOCKING – a few sips to quench your thirst.
If you enjoy playing games, you can spot the word magic in the #hashtags. If you’re more practical, you can translate them into traditional definitions, for example, #deathcult = neoliberalism, #dotcons = the boom-and-bust cycles of the dotcom era, #fashernista = someone fashionable in any subject, i’s not complex at this level.
The complexity lies in the perspective that weaves these elements into a coherent story. Yes, this storytelling could be seen as arrogance – if you choose to view it that way. But that judgment itself makes you a “nut” from the very perspective you critique.
Circles, magic, nets, outcomes – #OMN
