The #openweb needs diversity, not monoculture

The problems we face in the #openweb are often presented as technology problems. Which protocol, platform, licence, federation path, software? Which standard? These questions matter, but they are not the foundations of the problem. A lot of what we are seeing is really a cultural clash. Different parts of the alternative tech world have different ideas about what technology is for, who it should serve, how much control is acceptable, how open something needs to be, and how much compromise is useful? That difference isn’t necessarily a weakness, when we nurture this it can be our strength.

To do this we need to support, fund and actually use a wide range of #openweb technologies, as there is no single “right path” waiting to be discovered. The #openweb should be a messy ecosystem, some projects will be radical, others pragmatic by compromising with existing institutions. Some will refuse every compromise, some will be technically elegant, were others will be slightly ugly but actually useful. Some people will be idealists, some will be organisers, geeks, activists – some will be experimenters, others will be complete weirdos.

We need all of these people. Even the “sellouts” can push open technology into places that fundamentalists cannot reach. The fundamentalists can protect principles that pragmatists might otherwise throw away. The pragmatists can make things usable, while the experimenters can discover things nobody expected and the weirdos can see possibilities that the sensible people completely miss.

The problem starts when any one of these groups decides that they are the whole movement. Then diversity becomes tribalism, difference becomes factionalism and criticism attack. And eventually everyone starts spending more energy defeating people who are broadly on the same side as building the commons we actually need. We’ve seen this mess before, the history of alternative technology is full of splits between people who wanted to build practical infrastructure and people who wanted purity, between technical communities and social movements, between centralised coordination and decentralised autonomy.

The lesson shouldn’t be “pick the correct side” – it needs to be – learn how to work with difference. This is particularly important now because the #dotcons have already demonstrated what happens when a technical ecosystem becomes dominated by a few powerful platforms. Monoculture creates dependency, creates control that leads to vulnerability. The answer to this simply cannot be to build another monoculture with different branding, we need plural infrastructure, based on #KISS #openweb native standards that communicate with each other.

That is where #FOSS based on open standards and the #4opens become important, they give a common floor without demanding a common culture. We don’t need everyone to agree, but we need enough openness that different projects can coexist, exchange knowledge and build on each other’s work. This is also why projects such as #OMN, #OGB, #IndymediaBack and #MakingHistory shouldn’t be understood as competing for the one correct future. They are paths, pieces of a wider ecosystem.

Buts yes the important thing is to keep the commons alive while we experiment. The value isn’t in choosing one tribe and defeating the others, value is in creating conditions where difference can coexist, challenge assumptions, learn from failure and grow something wider than any individual project. We need disagreement without fragmentation, criticism without destruction and experimentation without constant reinvention. To make this work we also need pragmatism without selling everything out.

To help compost the #geekproblem we need technology that serves the social projects rather than becoming the social project. That means supporting the native diversity, contradictions and productive tensions that make an ecosystem resilient. And yes, you are right there are to meany people being prats currently on this subject.

Please try not to be one, thanks.

#openweb #OMN #4opens #Fediverse #FOSS #IndymediaBack #OGB #MakingHistory #DIY #commons

The Fediverse is fun and growing, but it seems to kinda be on autopilot at the moment

Q, The #Fediverse seams to kinda be on autopilot at the moment – I miss the days when the community was more focused….

A. I’d say it’s growing and changing. From my window, there’s a LOT happening. Many people are excited by the new stuff that’s landing, while others are afraid of how those changes may rock the boat they’re on. My solution is to build a bigger boat, because everyone needs the opportunity to be here. But that’s understandably scary for those who want a very small, exclusive community. Hopefully we can make tools that give affordances for both.

My metaphorical thinking on this is, yes, there is a lot of technical activity. New software, new protocols, bridges, funding, organisations and experiments. From that perspective, the #Fediverse is very active. But socially, it often feels like it’s on autopilot.

In the early years there was a shared sense that we were rebuilding the #openweb together. There were arguments, of course, but there was also a common direction. People were asking social questions about ownership, governance, federation and community. Those conversations created momentum beyond individual projects.

Today much of that shared vision has fragmented. Each project has its own roadmap, each server its own concerns, each funding stream its own priorities. That’s healthy to a point, but without a wider narrative the movement risks becoming a collection of software projects rather than a #openweb social movement.

I agree that we need a bigger boat. The internet needs one. But the question is what kind of boat are we building? If becoming bigger simply means attracting more users while reproducing the culture of the #dotcons, we’ve missed the point. Federation alone doesn’t create commons. We can decentralise servers while recentralising culture, governance and influence.

This is where the #OMN perspective differs from the current #mainstreaming. The challenge isn’t only scaling infrastructure – it’s scaling communities. A bigger boat still needs lots of crew who know how to sail it, repair it and decide together where it’s going. Without that, people become passengers rather than participants.

The #Fediverse already has the technical foundations. What it lacks is enough shared social infrastructure: ways to build trust, preserve collective memory, govern openly and connect local communities into something larger without creating another centre of power. That’s why I keep talking about #DIY, #MakingHistory and the #4opens. They aren’t distractions from the technology, they’re the missing social layer. The code is necessary, but code alone won’t build the commons.

Perhaps the feeling of “autopilot” comes from this imbalance. We’re very good at building new features, but much less good at building shared purpose. The result is #techchurn: lots of movement, but not always much direction.

So yes, let’s build a bigger boat, but let’s also build more harbours, more local communities, shared stories and more reasons for people to become co-builders instead of just users. Because the strength of the #openweb has never come from one magnificent ship.

It has always come from a sea full of small boats, travelling together without needing a single captain.

Update It’s interesting that there’s still so much denial about this history. To be clear, I’m not blaming the people who arrived in the #Fediverse after the shift in the first five years of its development. They only know the culture they arrived in. It’s understandable that many assume this is how the project has always been.

What needs to be better understood is that, for roughly the first five years, the #Fediverse and #ActivityPub were driven primarily as a social and political project. The technology mattered, but it was there to serve the wider goal of rebuilding #FOSS commons-based infrastructure and supporting subculture communities. The people doing the work were mostly motivated by those social and political aims, with technical and #mainstreaming perspectives forming a minority.

After that period, the balance shifted. As the network grew, technical concerns, institutional interests and #mainstreaming priorities became dominant, while the social and political vision became a minority. The conversation increasingly focused on software, scaling and features, rather than governance, commons, trust and community.

Neither perspective is wrong on its own. We need both. The problem is that the shift happened without much reflection, and today many people are simply unaware that it happened at all. There are now very few people left who have lived through both periods and can bridge the divide. Their experience matters because they remember why many of these projects were started in the first place.

The real frustration is with those few people who do know this history, who experienced the transition firsthand, yet now deny or minimise that it happened. That denial makes it much harder to have an honest conversation about where we are and where we need to go.

For everyone who arrived later, the response shouldn’t be blame – it should be curiosity. Every movement has a history, and understanding that history helps explain why today’s arguments keep repeating themselves. This isn’t unique to the #Fediverse. It’s a common pattern in grassroots projects. As movements grow, they become more institutional, more technical and more professionalised. The original political purpose fades into the background, and new participants naturally assume the current culture is the whole story.

If we want to avoid repeating that cycle, the first step is simple – Acknowledge that the shift happened. Only then can we decide, together, what kind of #Fediverse we want to build next.

How liberal media tries to “fix” liberal media

The current mess in media isn’t that journalism has become biased, its always been, the problem is that the “progressive” #mainstreaming institutions trying to solve the crisis are still inside the assumptions that created it. Take the current liberal darling project Ground News, their promise is attractive: escape your filter bubble, compare left and right, become a more informed citizen. But notice the framing, the solution to broken media is… another layer of liberal media infrastructure.

This is a classic liberal response, instead of questioning the structure, it tries to manage the symptoms. The wrong question is “How do we balance left and right?” where it’s better to ask “Who owns the infrastructure? Who controls trust? Who decides what is visible?” These are very different questions. Political bias matters, but ownership, funding, moderation and publishing infrastructure matter far more. They shape what can be said long before anyone labels an article “left” or “right”.

Modern liberal media believes enough transparency, enough fact-checking and enough algorithmic tuning can repair journalism. But every new layer simply becomes another institution requiring trust.

Who rates the raters?

Who moderates the moderators?

Who audits the algorithms?

The answer is usually another professional organisation, another foundation, another for profit corporation, or another “independent” expert group. This creates an endless chain of powerless power rather than building any genuine public trust, it’s the false centre. One #KISS thing we need to understand is that political “centrism” is not a neutral place, it is constructed. On a surface layer – when publications owned by billionaires are labelled “centre”, while grassroots or socialist publications are labelled “left”, the scale itself quietly normalises existing power. This isn’t necessarily a conspiracy, it is simply what happens when institutions built inside capitalism reproduce capitalist assumptions.

The #OpenMediaNetwork starts somewhere else – instead of trying to create perfect neutrality, it creates open process. The #4opens don’t solve bias or decide truth to determine who is correct, they simply make the process visible. This doesn’t eliminate conflict, instead it makes conflict transparent. People can inspect decisions, challenge moderation, fork communities, preserve history and build alternative trust networks. The goal isn’t perfect objectivity, it is accountable process, that in the end trust comes from communities

Liberal media imagines trust that comes from old (and by now well captured) institutions – where the #OMN argues that trust emerges from communities that can see how decisions are made, that trust is built through transparent moderation, open metadata, public discussion, versioned history actively used for federation instead of monopoly. This native path is closer to how the early #openweb worked, and how projects like #Indymedia succeeded before platforms enclosed this public conversation flow.

Ones you take this #KISS path the problem isn’t simply media bias it’s about ownership of traditional media itself. As long as publishing, discovery, moderation and archives remain controlled by institutions whose survival depends on existing power structures, every attempt to “fix” journalism will reproduce those same structures. This is the root problem when liberal media keeps trying to repair liberal media.

The #OMN starts somewhere different – building commons instead of platforms, process instead of authority and trust instead of branding. Yes, that won’t magically solve media bias, but what it can do is balance the current mess by creating open space where communities can solve these problems together. That is a much stronger foundation than asking another algorithm to tell us which billionaire newspaper is slightly more “centre” than another.

A deeper dive into composting this mess

#OMN #openweb #4opens #Indymedia #MakingHistory #DIY #Fediverse #dotcons

This was my thinking on the Fediverse a few years ago – building commons

The #Fediverse is an accidental reboot of the #openweb, it wasn’t designed from the top down, it emerged because thousands of people built alternatives to the #dotcons. That’s its greatest strength, it’s also why it’s so messy.

Herding cats – the #Fediverse has no central authority, every project, server, and community has its own priorities, culture, and governance. It’s often like herding cats. This can be frustrating, but it’s also what makes the network resilient. There is no single point of failure, no CEO to sell it, and no corporation that can simply shut it down. The challenge this leave us with is not eliminating the mess, but learning how to live with it productively.

The invisible problem that keeps blocking this path is in part the limits of “common sense”, what the #geekproblem refuses to see is that the difficulty isn’t primarily technical. For over forty years, #neoliberalism and #postmodernism have shaped what people experience as “common sense.” Competition replaces cooperation. Individualism replaces commons. Endless critique replaces collective construction. People absorb these assumptions without realising it, then push them over real alt paths.

When alternative ways of organising are introduced, many people instinctively react with hostility or retreat. Push too hard, and they disappear back into familiar habits, like snails retreating into their shells. This isn’t usually bad faith, it’s learned behaviour.

We have a project to mediate this mess, native governance without hierarchy. This is where the Open Governance Body (#OGB) comes in. The goal isn’t to control the #Fediverse or impose bureaucracy, the goal is to create lightweight, transparent ways for communities to coordinate, resolve conflict, share responsibility, and make decisions together.

Governance should emerge from the grassroots, not be imposed from above. That’s why #OGB builds on the principles of the #4opens:

Open Data
Open Source
Open Standards
Open Process

The last of these – Open Process – is the missing piece. Technical openness alone isn’t enough. Communities also need visible, participatory ways of building trust. What matters is creating processes that turn #mainstreaming failures into shared learning instead of endless conflict.

The future of the #openweb won’t be built by perfect software, it’s built by imperfect people who learn how to cooperate despite their differences. That’s the real work of #OMN and #OGB: not replacing the mess, but giving it enough structure to grow into a healthy commons.

#Fediverse #4opens #KISS #DIY #openweb

Why #FOSS matters socially

The internet didn’t become broken overnight, it drifted from being a network of communities into a marketplace dominated by platforms whose purpose is extracting value. This is the logic of #dotcons most of us invested our lives and community into. How did we get into this mess? The problem isn’t only bad companies, it’s that our digital lives depend entirely on proprietary #dotcons paths and software, commercial interests end up controlling our reality.

This is why #FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) matters. The “free” in #FOSS is about freedom, the freedom to use, study, modify and share the tools that shape our lives. Those freedoms create something much more important than software, they create #4opens social power. Open code means community accountability.

Instead of trusting #closedweb corporations, we can build “native” trust through transparency. That changes how communities work as closed platforms create consumers, open projects create participants. The community doesn’t just use the infrastructure, it becomes in part responsible for maintaining it. We can exit to a more #DIY path, were anyone can inspect, improve, challenge and adapt to disparate community needs.

This isn’t always the fastest path as open collaboration is often messy. Consensus takes time, criticism can be uncomfortable. But these are social strengths, not weaknesses. Diverse communities find problems earlier, reduce hidden bias and create paths and systems that are more resilient because they are shared.

The #OMN approach builds on this real world path and body of ideas. That technology can strengthen communities rather than replacing them, code can support human trust rather than algorithms deciding everything. Infrastructure should belong to the commons rather than becoming another private enclosure.

Today’s #closedweb social media platforms are digital landlords. Yes you may build a following, create value and invest years of work, but you’re still a tenant. The rules can change overnight, your reach can disappear, your community can be fragmented at the click of a button.

The #openweb offers another path were we have control of identity and content to connect through open protocols instead of closed silos. We need this more than ever to building communities that can survive the failure – or hostility – of any single platform.

We can’t keep repeating the same mess, this composting matters even more in the age of #AI. If the software, models and infrastructure are closed, then a handful of companies determine how knowledge is created, filtered and shared. If they are open, communities can inspect them, improve them and govern them together.

The future isn’t simply open source software, it’s open source society. That means investing back into the commons we depend on. Maintaining infrastructure, supporting contributors, building institutions that outlast individuals. Planting trees whose shade we may never sit under.

That’s what #OMN is about. Not simply writing better code, but helping build a better social fabric for the #openweb. Because freedom isn’t something technology gives us, it’s something communities build together.

A #mainstreaming video looking at this.

The current common sense of #neoliberal worldview replaces trust with greed as the social motivator. The problem is that every successful society is built on trust. When you undermine trust, you build a #deathcult. Climate breakdown, inequality, social isolation and failing public institutions are not accidents – they’re the predictable outcomes.

When people recognise the problem, ask them what the solution is. Most will instinctively reach for the same neoliberal “common sense” that created the crisis. That’s the moment to gently point out that those ideas are part of the #deathcult, not a way out.

The alternative starts with rebuilding trust, commons and community, #FOSS needs to become a core to this.

Why Stories Matter on the #OMN

Facts matter, technology matters, governance matters. But people rarely change because they read theory, a specification or a list of features. People change because of stories, this is why storytelling is central to the #OMN path. A story gives people somewhere to stand, it connects ideas to lived experience.

Instead of explaining the #4opens as an abstract framework, tell the story of a community escaping a #dotcons platform by building trust on the #openweb. Instead of arguing about governance, tell the story of how a group solved a conflict through #OpenProcess. Instead of listing technical features, tell the story of someone who regained control of their community tech after years of platform lock-in.

Stories carry values, the last forty years of #mainstreaming have been held together by stories about competition, consumption and individual success. These stories have normalised the #deathcult, making extraction and enclosure feel like “common sense.” We now need better stories about cooperation instead of competition, commons balancing ownership, about trust instead of surveillance. Stories about building rather than consuming.

The #Fediverse itself is a story, an accidental reboot of the #openweb that proves another internet is possible. It isn’t perfect, but it demonstrates that people can build social infrastructure without billionaires directing the conversation.

The challenge is that the academics or the #geekproblem tell stories only to other, academics or geeks, technical and academic paths are important, but they don’t inspire people to act, so we need stories that people can understand:

A neighbourhood rebuilding local media.
Boaters organising to defend the waterways as a commons.
Communities escaping the #dotcons.
Volunteers composting #techchurn into useful tools.
Ordinary people discovering that they can build infrastructure together.

These stories become shared memory, shared memory becomes culture, culture shapes “common sense.” and changing common sense is how lasting social change happens. So don’t just build software or academic theory, tell stories that help people imagine themselves as part of a healthier #openweb.

#OMN #FOSS #openweb #4opens #ActivityPub #Fediverse #commons #DIY #makinghistory

The #4opens: A Practical Compass for the #openweb

Need to come back to this, as people still are not seeing the value or use. The #4opens is a simple, practical tool for evaluating and guiding grassroots technology, media and social projects. Rather than asking whether a project is simply “open source”, it asks a broader question – can people actually trust this project to remain part of the commons? The #4opens helps distinguish native #openweb projects from #closedweb platforms and projects that have drifted into corporate, bureaucratic or #NGO capture. It is as much about social trust as it is about technology.

The Four Opens:

Open data is the foundation. The content, metadata and information created by a project should be openly accessible, portable and reusable. People should be able to export data, archive it independently and move between codebases without losing years of work. Open examples: Wikipedia content can be copied and mirrored, Mastodon users can export their accounts and migrate between instances, RSS feeds allow content to flow between different tools. Closed examples: Facebook owns your social graph, Instagram traps your audience, TikTok keeps your community inside its walls. Open data prevents lock-in and keeps knowledge in the commons.

Open Source. The software itself should be available under a free software licence. Anyone should be able to inspect the code, improve it, fix bugs, adapt it for local needs or fork it if necessary. Open examples: Mastodon, PeerTube, WordPress, MediaWiki, Linux. Closed examples: Facebook, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams But #4opens goes further than #FOSS, open code alone does not create an open project.

Open Standards. Projects should communicate using open protocols rather than proprietary APIs. Open standards allow different communities to use different software while remaining connected. Examples include: ActivityPub, RSS, email (SMTP/IMAP), HTTP, HTML This creates federation instead of monopolies, a Mastodon server can communicate with a PeerTube instance, an RSS reader can subscribe to thousands of independent websites. No central company owns these conversations. Contrast this with: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Discord, Teams as each creates its own isolated island. Open standards create ecosystems rather than products.

Open Process. This is the missing piece. Many projects are technically open while socially closed. Open Process asks: Who actually makes decisions? How are disagreements handled? Can newcomers participate? Is governance visible? Can communities influence direction? Is power accountable? Without open process, “open source” becomes: founder dictatorship, hidden hierarchies, developer elitism, endless forks, NGO capture and corporate capture. Open Process keeps projects alive as commons rather than products. This is why #4opens adds the social layer missing from some traditional #FOSS thinking.

An example of how it can work – The #4opens deliberately keeps things simple, projects can roughly assess themselves, others can assess them – people aggregate the results.

2 Opens — Bronze

3 Opens — Silver

4 Opens — Gold

This is horizontal – point of this isn’t certification, it is encouraging projects to become progressively more open.

Examples:

Wikipedia

✔ Open Data

✔ Open Source

✔ Open Standards

✔ Open Process (imperfect but visible)

A Gold project.

Mastodon

Generally Gold. However, individual instances vary enormously, a technically open instance with opaque moderation becomes weaker on Open Process. Technology is only half the story.

PeerTube

Strong across all four opens as it provides decentralised video hosting without surrendering control to YouTube.

Facebook

✘ Open Data

✘ Open Source

✘ Open Standards

✘ Open Process

A classic #closedweb platform.

Signal

Excellent encryption, good open source, weak federation as governance remains centralised. Strong tool for private communication, but not a complete #openweb social infrastructure.

So why open process matters – Many grassroots projects fail here, the code is open, the data might be open. But decisions happen behind closed doors, so that power accumulates around: maintainers, foundations, funding, celebrities, NGOs. Eventually communities lose trust, people fork, energy fragments. Nothing grows, the technical project survives but the social project dies. The #4opens recognises this pattern.

It is at root a tool for composting – the #4opens isn’t a purity test, nobody starts perfect, instead it asks – Which direction are we moving? Projects drift, communities drift, funding changes, people leave. The #4opens gives us a simple way to notice when projects are becoming enclosed. Instead of abandoning them, we can compost the mess, repair governance, open the data, document the process to replace hidden power with visible trust. The Open Media Network builds directly on the #4opens, the aim is not simply better software, it is social infrastructure that communities can actually #DIY themselves.

People can grow, infrastructure based on trust rather than surveillance, federation rather than monopoly, commons rather than platforms, participation rather than consumption and cooperation rather than extraction. Technology is simply the tool, the real project is rebuilding the commons.

A simple question to ask is, whenever you encounter a new project, ask four questions:

Can I get my data out?

Can I inspect or improve the code?

Can I communicate with other systems?

Can I see how decisions are made?

If the answer is “yes” to all four, you’re probably looking at a native #openweb project. If not, you’re probably feeding another #closedweb platform. The #4opens won’t solve every problem, but they do provide a remarkably effective compass for navigating the difference between projects that grow the commons and projects that quietly enclose it.

#KISS

How we built the neoliberal #Deathcult

For most people, the crisis feels recent. Housing costs. Energy bills. Food prices. Debt. Insecure work. Growing inequality. Endless wars. Ecological breakdown. The #mainstreaming story is that these are separate problems with separate causes. COVID. Ukraine. China. Immigration. Technology. Bad politicians. The reality is simpler, these crises grow from the same roots – the moment things changed, one graph tells the story.

From the end of World War II until roughly the early 1970s, productivity and wages rose together. When workers produced more value, they received a larger share of that value. This was not charity. It was the social settlement that emerged from the disasters of the Great Depression and World War II. Governments understood that if ordinary people could not afford the goods they produced, capitalism would repeatedly collapse into crisis. The answer was public investment, strong unions, social housing, public infrastructure, public healthcare, education, and rising wages.

This was what some people now call the “golden age” of capitalism. Workers bought homes. Families survived on a single income. Public infrastructure expanded. Living standards generally improved. Then the trend broke, as productivity continued rising, but wages stopped. For the last fifty years, workers have produced more and more while receiving proportionally less and less. The wealth didn’t disappear, it moved upward.

Saving capitalism from itself – The original US New Deal wasn’t created because elitists became generous, it emerged because the system faced a legitimacy crisis. Mass unemployment. Mass poverty. Growing labour movements. Strong socialist alternatives. Faced with these pressures, governments invested in public works, strengthened labour rights, regulated finance, and redistributed wealth. The lesson was simple, if people have money, they buy goods, if people buy goods, businesses survive, if businesses survive, the economy functions. This wasn’t radical, it was practical as the state acted to stabilise society.

The neoliberal turn – by the 1970s, a different ideology was waiting in the wings. The solution offered by thinkers such as Milton Friedman and institutions such as the Chicago School was to reverse the post-war settlement. Privatise public assets, break unions, cut taxes on wealth, deregulate finance and reduce social spending to treat everything as a market. This project became government policy under Reagan, Thatcher, and much of the Western political class. The promise was freedom, the result was enclosure. Public wealth became private wealth, collective institutions were weakened, corporate power expanded, the bargaining power of workers collapsed.

The result was clear, the graph above tells the story, productivity kept climbing, compensation stagnated. The gains increasingly flowed upward. For the workers debt replaced wages, the old social contract was based on rising incomes, the new one was based on borrowing. If wages no longer rise fast enough, people still need homes, education, healthcare, transport. The gap was filled with debt: Credit cards, Student loans, Mortgages, Personal loans. Instead of sharing productivity gains directly, people borrowed against their futures. This worked for a while, until it didn’t.

A resent example of this mess is 2008 – The financial crash – exposed the reality, when ordinary people face crisis, they are told to tighten their belts. When financial institutions face crisis, public money appears instantly. Millions lost homes, lost jobs. Meanwhile, banks received vast bailouts. The lesson was clear. The system still knew how to mobilise resources, it simply chose who to save.

This is why we use the harsh hashtag #Deathcult. Composting this mess is where the #OMN idea of the #deathcult becomes useful as neoliberalism is not simply a set of economic policies, it is a cultural common sense. It teaches a “common sense” path that markets solve everything and that public solutions are inefficient. That society does not exist, that individuals succeed or fail alone. That endless growth on a finite planet is normal. That every commons must become a commodity.

This invisible ideology is now so deeply embedded that many people cannot imagine alternatives. The system creates crises and then presents more market solutions as the answer. Climate collapse becomes carbon trading. Housing crisis becomes investment opportunity. Community becomes #dotcons platforms. Citizens become consumers. The cure is always more of the disease.

In this mess we need to remember what we have lost, the biggest loss wasn’t economic, it was social. The institutions that once balanced private power were weakened: Trade unions, Cooperatives, Mutual aid, Community media, Public ownership, Local democracy, Shared stewardship, The commons. These weren’t perfect, but they gave ordinary people collective power. Without them, people are pushed into isolated competition. What #OMN calls #stupidindividualism. Everyone struggling alone against systems too large to influence individually.

Building beyond the mess, is not about post-modern nostalgia, the post-war settlement was deeply flawed. But what is built can be rebuilt, this means on a progressive path creating commons rather than commodities, governance rather than management, participation rather than consumption and community media rather than corporate platforms to grow cooperation rather than extraction.

As social infrastructure, the #4opens provide one practical foundation for this work: open process, open data, open standards and open licences. Because the real challenge is not technological. It is rebuilding the social relationships that make alternatives possible.

To sum up the graph of productivity and wages is not simply an economic chart, it is a map showing where the wealth went. And once we know where it went, we can start asking a more useful question: #KISS how do we build something different?

A #fluffy view on why things are not changing

#OMN #OpenWeb #4opens #Deathcult #Neoliberalism #Commons #MutualAid #FoodSovereignty #CommunityMedia #OpenGovernance #NothingNew #DIY #KISS

Thatcher, Reagan were the wrecking crew: How we keep pushing mess

This story is about the ideology that won. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two politicians on either side of the Atlantic didn’t only win elections, they reshaped what people came to accept as “common sense.” Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States did not invent capitalism’s worst tendencies, but they gave them state power, institutional infrastructure, and ideological legitimacy.

What they built was not simply a set of policies, it was a social programme we are still trapped inside more than forty years later. The push was simple and devastating citizens became “taxpayers,” public services became “handouts,” collective investment became “inefficiency,” and the commons became a problem to be solved through privatisation.

Decades of postwar social infrastructure – built on the understanding that some things are too important to be left to markets – were dismantled, defunded, and handed over to private interests -the very same interests funding the political projects carrying out the dismantling.

This is what #OMN means when we talk about enclosure. Not just land enclosure, but the enclosure of everyday life itself: Water, housing, transport, education, healthcare, communication and culture. Everything turned into a commodity.

Neither Thatcher nor Reagan created this mess, the project was carefully engineered. Reagan established a President’s Commission on Privatisation which drew up extensive plans to strip public assets and services. Thatcher pushed through mass privatisation of utilities, council housing, and national industries while selling the process as “popular capitalism.”

Behind them stood an entire ideological machine of the Heritage Foundation, the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Reason Foundation, and countless university economics departments and corporate-funded policy groups.

Their role was to make radical upward redistribution sound like neutral common sense, and they succeeded. Even the language changed “tax burden,” “efficiency,” “choice,” “reform,” “flexibility.” Every word quietly carrying the ideology.

The method itself was brutally simple – cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations. Create public deficits. Use those deficits to declare public services “unaffordable.” Privatise the resulting wreckage. Transfer wealth upward. Starve public institutions until they fail, then point at the failure as proof they never worked.

The cruelty was not accidental, it was structural. Thatcher’s Chancellor openly described mass unemployment as “a price worth paying.” Reagan’s administration treated social devastation as collateral damage in the restoration of elitist power.

The results were not abstract, from 1948 to roughly 1979 in the United States, productivity and worker wages rose together. After Reagan, productivity continued climbing sharply while wages largely stagnated. Workers produced more wealth than ever before, but a growing share of that wealth flowed upward into capital accumulation rather than wages or public goods.

The mess this created was Labour’s share of national income steadily declined while housing costs rose, debt exploded, unions collapsed, and public infrastructure deteriorated. Debt became the mechanism keeping society functioning: mortgages, credit cards, car loans, student loans, payday lending. Daily survival increasingly depended on borrowing. Higher education shifted from a public good into a privatised commodity. Healthcare became financial extraction. Housing became speculation rather than shelter.

The language was “freedom.” But the freedom being expanded was the freedom of capital. None of this was racially neutral. Reagan’s “welfare queen” narrative deliberately racialised poverty to fracture working-class solidarity. The actual fraud case behind the story was tiny compared to the propaganda built around it, but the myth worked politically because it redirected anger downward rather than upward.

The so-called “War on Drugs” targeted Black communities while harsher sentencing laws entrenched mass incarceration. Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic was ignored for years because many of the people dying were treated as disposable by political elites. Thatcher’s government supported sanctions-busting trade with apartheid South Africa while denouncing the ANC and treating Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.

These were not side issues, the neoliberalism story required enemies: welfare scroungers, criminals, radicals, immigrants, trade unionists, the “undeserving poor.” Every enclosure needs someone to blame for the damage enclosure causes.

In the rich west the programme attacked wages, unions, and public services. Abroad it was openly violent. Reagan’s administration funded and armed the Contras in Nicaragua despite international condemnation. US-backed regimes across Latin America carried out massacres, disappearances, and systematic repression while being framed as defenders of “freedom.” Thatcher supported Augusto Pinochet long after the scale of torture and repression was well known.

The noise was consistent and on going as liberation movements became “terrorists,” dictators aligned with Western capital became “allies,” and democracy mattered only when it protected existing power. The same logic still dominates global politics today.

What was lost was not only economic, the postwar social settlement – however flawed – rested on the idea that some things belonged to everyone and should be collectively protected:

healthcare,
housing,
education,
water,
transport,
welfare,
culture,
democratic infrastructure.

These systems were not gifts from benevolent elitists, they were won through the struggle by labour movements, cooperatives, mutual aid traditions, socialist organising, and community solidarity. Thatcher famously claimed:

“There is no such thing as society.”

This was not only rhetoric, it was a political programme. Destroy people’s belief in collective action and you destroy their ability to resist enclosure. This is where the #OMN critique of the “tragedy of the commons” matters. People are capable of managing commons collectively, history is full of successful examples, what neoliberalism destroys are the social conditions that make commons possible:

trust,
reciprocity,
accountability,
long-term stewardship,
community responsibility.

When competition replaces care, extraction replaces stewardship, hyper-individualism – what we call #stupidindividualism – erodes social fabric itself. The tragedy becomes real because the conditions needed to avoid it are systematically dismantled.

Understanding this matters not for nostalgia, but for navigation. The crises surrounding us now: housing collapse, ecological breakdown, inequality, democratic decay, loneliness, food insecurity, social fragmentation, mental health crises, are not random failures. They are predictable outcomes of forty years of #neoliberal wrecking. The mess this created is functioning largely as designed, prioritises elitist capital accumulation above any social wellbeing.

The liberal centre cannot solve this because it operates inside the same logic, technocratic management of decline is not transformation. Real alternatives require rebuilding #KISS commons-based infrastructure, not only as abstract ideals, but as practical trust infrastructure. This is the work of composting the current mess and growing alternatives from within the ruins.

Thatcher claimed there was no alternative, she was wrong. But building alternatives means being honest about what was destroyed, who destroyed it, how they destroyed it, and why the same logic still dominates today. This honesty is where rebuilding begins.

With this in mind, let’s recap on what Thatcher and Reagan built, its not just bad policy, not just inequality, its a full #deathcult – the self-destructive logic of #neoliberalism so committed to short-term greed and #stupidindividualism that it knowingly sacrifices the ecological and social foundations human life depends on. Forty years of hard indoctrination that doesn’t just fade away its – normal is walking around in a toxic story and calling it common sense.

The #nastyfew – platform owners, landlords, corporate lobbies, think tank networks – didn’t win through merit. They won the #classwar temporarily, by capturing institutions, rewriting rules, and flooding the #mainstreaming with their logic until it felt like gravity.

The #dotcons – Facebook, Google, X/Twitter and the rest – are the digital continuation of the same enclosure. Corporate platforms built on data extraction, presenting themselves as neutral public spaces while converting human attention and community into profit. The #closedweb is just privatisation with a friendlier interface.

And the #climatechaos bearing down on us is not a separate crisis. It is the #deathcult arriving at its logical destination.

Real alternatives are built from the bottom, not handed down from the top. The #openweb – internet infrastructure built on open standards, community control, and the #4opens (open code, open data, open standards, open process) – already exists as working infrastructure, built by thousands of ordinary people, not governments or corporations. Then we have the #fediverse, #activitypub, #FOSS, #indymedia – these are not utopian visions, already built, from the ground up, by people practising #DIY politics for real.

The #geekproblem is when this gets captured – when technical control replaces social trust, when complexity becomes a barrier rather than a tool, when #techchurn burns through community energy without building anything lasting. The antidote is #KISS – keeping it simple, human, and rooted in real relationships.

The #NGO path – professionalised, funder-friendly, managed dissent – is #mainstreaming with a radical badge on, it defuses rather than builds. The #fashernista tendency prioritising the look and language of activism over the unglamorous work of building lasting structure is #fluffy blocking in performance clothing.

What actually works is #grassroots organising grounded in trust, horizontal process, and the willingness to #compost failure breaking down what didn’t work into fuel for what comes next rather than hiding the mess or repeating it. As the #OMN path puts it: broken institutions need rebuilding as commons, not as managed services or branded campaigns.

The #deathcult is real, the mess is real, the #nothingnew reminder is useful – these cycles have happened before, and ignoring that history is how we walk straight into the same traps again. But so is the ground we already stand on, sart there.

#OMN #Neoliberalism #Thatcher #Reagan #OpenWeb #4opens #Commons #MutualAid #FoodSovereignty #ClimateChaos #Mainstreaming #Deathcult #Dotcons #BuildingAlternatives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Treating everything as personal conflict is a dead end

#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#grassroots – bottom-up power, not institutional mediation

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

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

#deathcult (neoliberalism as destructive common sense)

#neoliberalism – 40 years of market logic shaping behaviour

#dotcons – corporate capture of digital space

#closedweb – controlled, extractive infrastructure

#mainstreaming – dilution and co-option of radical ideas

#NGO – managed dissent and professionalised politics

#classwar – underlying structural conflict

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

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

#geekproblem – replacing social trust with technical control

#techchurn – endless pointless rebuilding

#encryptionists – over-prioritising technical purity over social reality

#KISS – counterbalance: keep things simple and usable.

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

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

#stupidindividualism – learned self-interest over collective good

#postmodernism – fragmentation of shared meaning

#fluffy – avoidance of conflict, feel-good paralysis

#spiky – necessary confrontation and edge

#block – reflex rejection of challenge

#blinded – inability to see outside dominant narratives

#fashernista – prioritising appearance over substance

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

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

#fediverse – decentralised network as a base layer

#activitypub – the protocol glue

#RSS – simple, open distribution backbone

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

#FOSS / #opensource – shared ownership of tools

#opendata – accessible, non-extractive information

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

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

#OGB – structured, open governance

#openprocess – again, because it’s that important

#DIY – practical ownership and responsibility

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

Practice & Direction (how we move).

#reboot – reset and rebuild from working patterns

#indymediaback – learning from past grassroots media

#makinghistory – documenting and owning our narratives

#nothingnew – grounding in historical cycles

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

Grounding Example Layer

#Oxford – real-world test bed of contradictions

#PGA – historical example of horizontal organising

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

The Meta Layer (how to use this)

#compost – break down failure into growth

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

bad behaviour → learning

failed projects → patterns

conflict → structure

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

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

Do you remember when technology felt like a way forward?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comparing Decentralized #openweb Protocols

Growing the #openweb – Notes for Composting the #dotcons (and growing an #OMN)

Today there are a lot of dishonest people – it’s become the default. Finding someone who is actually truthful is rare. So with this in mind, let’s stop being polite about this, what we’re living inside online right now isn’t “social media.” It’s a managed enclosure – a system designed to extract value, shape behaviour, and concentrate power. It’s what I have been saying for the last 20 years. Call it what it is – digital #feudalism – The Lords, the Serfs, and the Server.

When everyone is pushed onto one big virtual server, you don’t get community, you get hierarchy. Platform owners become landlords. Users become tenants. Visibility becomes rent. This is not accidental, it’s the business model and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

The lie of “Ease of Use”. People say these #closedweb systems are “easy.” They’re not, they hide the cost, what looks simple is just complexity moved out of sight. Advertising Is the rot, a business model moral hazard, when profit depends on attention truth becomes optional and outrage becomes profitable leading to manipulation as the new normal. You don’t get healthy communities from this, you get addiction loops and behavioural engineering. And yes, the inevitable result is screen clutter, noise, and a slow degradation of any meaningful communication, communities are managed, not grown.

So who is going to do the #DIY work? Real moderation works when it’s embedded in the community itself. Algorithmic control is anti-social, the algorithmic timeline is one of the worst ideas we’ve normalised. It drives distraction, by showing you more of what you’ve already seen, it tries to control your desires by interfering with human communication. Over time, this destroys trust, when people stop knowing if they’re being heard, they stop knowing what is real, stop trusting the space. That’s not a bug, it’s the outcome.

The celebrity illusion is how centralised platforms manufacture “importance” for brands and influencers. These only function inside controlled visibility systems, outside of that? They’re often just paper tigers. In a real network – a messy, distributed, human one – influence has to be earned, not bought or algorithmically inflated.

The commodification of human life leads to inevitable decay. Left alone, centralised platforms drift towards monopoly, manipulation and towards the amplification of the worst actors as these actors game the system best. Without constant control from above, the system degrades, with repression, it becomes what we see today, authoritarian. That’s the trap, a community you can buy your way into is not a community, it’s a marketplace.

So what’s the alternative? We don’t fix this by tweaking features. We fix it by changing the ground or tech grows from. This new growth has been seeded by the #Fediverse, It’s where the #OMN comes in, not as another platform, but as a shift back to distributed networks instead of central servers, commons-based paths instead of enclosure, social moderation instead of outsourced control, open protocols instead of locked interfaces. And yes, that means less “slick”, less uniform, more messy. But also more real, accountable and human.

A final point (That should be obvious). The problem is not that the current #dotcons systems are broken, the problem is that they are working exactly as designed. If we want something better, we don’t patch the system, we compost it to grow the #openweb back – this time with the native cultural roots intact.