When mainstreaming colonize the things that work

In alt-culture paths we have meany problems, one of them is the #mainstreaming “colonize” what works, absorbing popular, fringe, and grassroots ideas, stripping them of their radical core, and adapting them to serve the common sense #deathcult paths. Let’s look at an example of this sewage pipeline:

Organic success, a movement, phrase, or subculture gains organic traction because it effectively speaks to real-world anxieties, desires, or truths (e.g., environmentalism, civil rights language, or anti-establishment rhetoric).
The “invasion” of language, institutions, corporate entities, or dominant political figures notice the strategic effectiveness of this concept, they “colonize” it by adopting its language, framing, and aesthetics to appeal to the public.
Dilution and diffusion, absorbed into the mainstream, the original, transformative power of the idea is neutralized, restructured to reinforce existing power systems rather than challenge them.

An example we can look at here is the story of Burning Man that holds a warning for the #Fediverse and the wider #openweb reboot. That #techshit success can becomes the process that destroys the thing that made our reboot worth doing in the first place.

Burning Man was born from Rainbow Gathering traditions, from this native path, culture of participation, self-reliance, gifting and collective effort, people didn’t only turn up to consume an experience; they made things #DIY, built spaces, shared skills and invited strangers to join in. The organizations came later, as a way to describe and pass on the culture that had grown organically from the grassroots.

But as Burning Man became successful, those principles became easier to package, sell and perform. Participation become an identity rather than a practice, so self-reliance could become an expensive aesthetic. Then community could become an institution, with the living culture buried beneath branding, bureaucracy and the drug feed path of commercial convenience.

The danger isn’t as simply as outsiders arrived or money entered the picture. It was that the culture became capable of reproducing the appearance of its values without requiring people to practise them. You could buy your way into the experience without developing the skills, relationships and responsibilities that had made it meaningful in the first place.

This is the trap of mainstreaming that the #Fediverse is now walking into it with its eyes closed. We keep hearing from our current self appointed “leadership crew” that the answer to the Fediverse’s problems is to grow, attract mainstream users, become more familiar and make ourselves acceptable to the platforms and institutions we’re supposedly trying to move beyond. On this path growth is treated as success in itself, familiarity becomes the measure of progress. The harder questions about power, ownership, participation and community are pushed aside, ignored and then repressed.

But who is this mainstreaming actually for? What are we trying to grow, and what are we prepared to lose along the way? The #Fediverse like rainbow gathering and its bastard sibling burning man grew from a different set of possibilities: decentralized communication, community-run servers, open protocols and the ability to build social spaces outside corporate control. Its value isn’t simply that it offers another place to post, it is that people participate in building and governing the spaces through which their communication flows.

Yet the blind pushing from the current #mainstreaming crew risks turning those #4opens possibilities into the normal consumer path. Instead of growing communities capable of running their own infrastructure, we concentrate on attracting users. Instead of strengthening collective responsibility, we make everything more convenient and expect somebody else to handle the difficult parts. Instead of building shared power, we copy the familiar platform model and hope a nicer technical foundation will somehow produce a different outcome.

This is where the #geekproblem comes in. Technical people become so focused on adoption, interfaces, scale and implementation that they lose sight of the social purpose of the technology. They build systems that make participation look easy, while doing little to help people become more capable participants. The result is a growing network with increasingly passive users and increasingly concentrated and blinded influence.

The lesson from Burning Man isn’t that growth is always bad, or that institutions and infrastructure are unnecessary. The same culture that produced commercial spectacle also produced genuine solidarity and practical action, including volunteers helping communities recover after Hurricane Katrina. The gift and its shadow grew from the same source.

The question is what our success makes possible – and what it allows us to avoid. A principle is a map, not the territory. Saying we believe in decentralization doesn’t make us decentralized in practice. Saying we support the commons doesn’t mean we share responsibility. Calling something participatory doesn’t mean people have any meaningful influence over it. We have to look at what our structures actually do.

This is why the #OMN project matter in practical sense, not only as culture. We need practical tools for grassroots news, shared archives and community media, built around open flows, reusable data and human trust. We need infrastructure that helps people and communities make things together, rather than another platform designed to turn them into an audience. We need to grow the capacity to participate, not just the number of accounts.

#Mainstreaming should 90% mean taking the values of the #openweb out into the wider world – not reshaping the #openweb until it fits the expectations of the mainstream. If growth requires us to abandon the practices that make the network different, then we need to ask what, exactly, we are growing.

The test isn’t whether our projects become bigger, more polished or more familiar. It’s whether people gain more ability to act, organize, share and govern together. It’s whether the structures serve the communities, or the communities end up serving the structures. Less performance, more participation – Less passive consumption, more shared capacity – Less chasing growth for its own sake, more building things that work.

Keep the tools simple, the flows open and power close to the people doing the work. That’s how we grow the #lifecult instead of reproducing the #deathcult in a new technical wrapper, it’s how we compost the #techshit and build an #openweb worth having. The test isn’t what our projects say they stand for, it’s what people become able to do through them.

#OMN #4opens #Indymedia #Fediverse #openweb

Turning the lifeboat electric – Solar Power for down-river cruising

One of the big experiments with the new #BoatingEurope lifeboat is to see how far we can move towards electric cooking and propulsion using solar power. The aim isn’t to build a high-speed electric boat, this is a slow, down-river cruising boat, where we can take advantage of the river current, travel at relatively low speeds and use solar energy for much of the everyday electrical demand.

The basic idea is simple – lots of solar + a decent battery bank + efficient electric pod motors = slow cruising without running the diesel engine most of the time. It is an experiment, and we are trying to do it without spending ridiculous amounts of money.

Two solar systems

The boat currently has two separate solar systems.

800W solar at 48V for the main propulsion and high-power kitchen electrical system
600W solar at 24V for the house electrical system

The 48V system is the interesting one because it will eventually feed the electric propulsion system as well as the 48V 6.5K inverter.

We are deliberately keeping the systems separated rather than trying to make one enormous electrical system do everything. The 24V bank will continue to look after the more conventional boat systems and most of the domestic electrical loads.

New boat half done, ready for the motors in the spring

48V propulsion system

The main battery bank is currently 10kWh at 48V, with 400A of BMS. There is physical space to increase this to 20kWh or more when we find that the extra capacity is useful. That is important because battery capacity matters more than peak motor power for the sort of cruising we are planning. We aren’t expecting to run the motors flat out, the plan is to run them at roughly half power for normal cruising, with full power available for short periods when manoeuvring, getting off a mooring or dealing with stronger water. That should make the available battery capacity go considerably further.

The motors

We are looking at relatively inexpensive Chinese electric pod motors rather than an expensive western purpose-built marine electric propulsion system. The current candidate is the TH60 48V 5600W brushless IP68 pod motor, rated at around 60kg of thrust each. The proposed setup is two motors.

The quoted package is:

2 × TH60 motors
1 × 200A ESC with built-in BEC
1 × remote control and receiver
DDP shipping/tax included

The quoted total is $1,408.90

That is the sort of price that makes the experiment interesting. Obviously there are questions around longevity, efficiency, spares and how well these motors actually perform in a real boat. That’s part of the experiment, we are not pretending that buying cheap motors from China magically solves electric propulsion.

Charging

We are also trying not to make the system dependent on one charging source. Initially we will have a limited 200w charge from the existing boat alternator into the 48V system. There will also be 800W of mains charging when the boat is connected to shore power. That gives us option for longer electric cruising. For example, if we spend a night in a marina, we can put a decent amount of energy back into the batterys before setting off again, the interesting part is what happens when we leave the marina.

The solar path

Most of the time we expect to be traveling slowly in sunny weather. That means the solar system doesn’t necessarily have to replace everything we use every day. It just needs to put a useful amount of energy back into the batteries while we are cruising and sitting around during the day. With 800W of solar feeding the 48V system, we should be able to generate a useful amount of energy over a day’s cruising, particularly when the boat is moving slowly and the motors aren’t being pushed hard.

The 7.2KW 24V system provides a separate source for the house loads. So rather than thinking of solar as an emergency backup, we are trying to make it part of the normal energy cycle of the boat.

Sun → solar → batteries → motors → movement.

The other battery bank

There is also a completely separate 24V house battery bank of around 7.2kWh. This means that laptops, cameras, lighting, electronics, pumps and the other domestic loads don’t have to compete with propulsion for battery capacity. That’s quite important, one of the mistakes with electric boats can be thinking only about the motors. In reality, the boat itself consumes energy all the time. Keeping the house and propulsion systems separated gives us a much clearer picture of where the energy reserve is.

The 6.5kW inverter

The 48V system will also feed a 6.5kW inverter, which gives us 240V AC for the kitchen and other high-power tools and equipment. We are currently working through the cable runs and bus-bar arrangement.

The minimalist cable plan is

3m of 70mm² cable from bilge battery bank to the cabin main bus bar at the inverter and out towards the motors.
short 35mm² cable to the inverter, then 240V AC onward to the kitchen
around 4m of 50mm² cable from the main system to the rear boat bus bar
around 2m of 16mm² cable from the rear bus bar to each pod mounted on the back platform

This is maybe a little under speck, still being worked through rather than treated as a finished design. High-current 48V systems need careful attention to voltage drop, fusing, isolation, connections and cable heating, particularly when there are long cable runs and several kilowatts involved.

Why 48V DC power?

At these power levels, 48V makes a lot more sense than trying to run the propulsion system at 12V or 24V. The higher voltage means substantially lower current for the same amount of power. That’s particularly useful on a boat because copper cable gets expensive and heavy very quickly once you start pushing hundreds of amps around. Even so, 6kW at 48V is still a lot of current, which is why the battery, BMS, bus bars, fuses, cables and connectors all need to be designed as one system.

How far can we actually go?

That’s the big question. We have already done a five-year journey through 13 European countries using conventional diesel propulsion. This next stage is partly about seeing whether the same sort of slow, river-based traveling can be done with a much larger proportion of our energy coming directly from the sun.

The boat isn’t going to become a solar-powered speedboat, that’s not the point, the idea is to use the characteristics of down-river cruising to our advantage. If we travel slowly, use the river current, avoid unnecessary acceleration and don’t expect to run the motors at full power all day, then our energy requirements become much more manageable.

And when we do need more energy, we have several options:

solar → battery → electric motors

shore power → battery → electric motors

and, at least initially trickle charging

diesel alternator → battery

The diesel engine therefore becomes more of a sea crossing and range extender rather than the thing that has to run continuously.

A real-world experiment

This is very much a #BoatingEurope experiment rather than a finished commercial system. We are using what we already have, adding relatively inexpensive components where they make sense, and leaving ourselves room to expand the battery capacity and solar generation when the experience shows that we need it.

The eventual target is around 20kWh of 48V battery capacity, backed by the existing 7.2kWh 24V house bank, with around 2KW of solar across the two systems. Whether that is enough remains to be seen, the interesting bit is finding out in the real world. A slow boat moving down European rivers, powered partly by the sun, with the river doing some of the work as well. That feels like a rather good experiment for the next chapter of #BoatingEurope.

Sun on the roof.
Electric pods in the water.
A river underneath us.
And hopefully a lot less diesel.

Boatingeurope talk

#lifeboat #DIY #adventure

https://www.patreon.com/c/boatingeurope

Bunker as a metaphor

There is something revealing about the way powerful people talk about our future, when they imagine crisis, they imagine their escape. A luxury bunker, fortress border, a private city, a rocket or an #AI cloud. A place for the self chosen few to survive while everyone else is left outside to die.

This is the “logic” of the #deathcult we all worship, if the world is breaking, protect yourself rather than repair the world. It should be obverse to us that this is is not really any actual plan for the future, its just more head down worship, an admission that this class have stopped believing in any thing at all.

But, yes they hid this, they still tend to tell a story, the shiny version of this story is always the same, out of catastrophe comes a golden city, the old world burns, the rubble is cleared, and the self selecting few build something beautiful on top of it.

We have heard this story for thousands of years, apocalypse, judgement, Armageddon, collapse, then purification for paradise for the few survivors. The modern retelling simply replaces heaven with a billionaire bunker, an exclusive smart city, an AI utopia or a colony on Mars, different technology, same path.

On this #mainstreaming path some people, who we call the #nastyfew in the #OMN hashtag story, deserve to survive the mess they created. But what is not told in this simply story is that the bunker is hard right politics – #climatechaos, pandemics, resource conflicts, economic insecurity and technological disruption are real problems. But there are two very different ways to respond to systemic crisis.

One response is – How do we protect everyone and make the system more resilient?

The other is – How do I make sure I am on the inside when it collapses?

The second path is not surprisingly increasingly visible in #nastyfew billionaire culture, authoritarian politics and in the #dotcons industry we all spend way to much time inside.

in this modern story, the bunker is not just a building underground, it is a political metaphor, fortress borders are bunkers, private security is a bunker, gated communities are bunkers, #closedweb platforms are bunkers. What matters for us in #FOSS is monopolized infrastructure is a bunker. Even the fantasy of escaping humanity through #AI or space is another bunker, an attempt to leave the shared social and ecological world rather than compost our dysfunctional relationship with it.

This path is the opposite of the #openweb,it is were the #deathcult turns fear into control. The right-wing answer to social crisis is always built around fear – Fear of outsiders, fear of immigrants, fear of social change, fear of losing status, fear of disorder, fear of the future. But, then comes the golden lie, the promise, we will protect you, but this protection soon becomes control. The anger that should be directed toward concentrated wealth and political power gets redirected sideways and downwards toward other ordinary people.

The poor become the problem, migrants become the problem, minorities become the problem, the left becomes the problem. The messy complexity of society is reduced to enemies, it is an old political trick that the #blinded technological #closedweb makes much more powerful. Today’s authoritarian politics doesn’t arrive wearing an old-fashioned uniform. the phone in our pocket, influencers, algorithms, targeted advertising, surveillance systems, AI-generated propaganda and permanently monetised outrage. The infrastructure of the #dotcons is a bunker.

But what we focus on the #OMN path is there is alternative, this alternative isn’t pretending that everything is fine, not another shiny utopia, and it certainly isn’t waiting for some perfect political party, perfect technology or perfect leader to save us. The alternative is much more boring – Build things that work, trust, commons, local resilience. Create media systems where communities can see and understand what is happening. Focus more on building technologies that people can actually control by #KISS keeping the infrastructure understandable so participation is possible. Create spaces where people can disagree without immediately becoming enemies. That sounds much less exciting than an AI god or a $50 million survival bunker, good, what we need to do as the #DIY grassroots is move from bunkers to bridges

The important question is not, who gets into the bunker? The question is, what are we building outside it? Because humans have already built an enormous number of bunkers, political bunkers, economic bunkers, cultural bunkers, technological bunkers, information bunkers. We don’t need more, we need bridges, and bridges are fundamentally different from bunkers.

A bunker protects something by excluding people, a bridge creates value by connecting people. That is the deeper #openweb possibility – not a technological escape from society, but technology that helps society organize itself. Not centralized control, but distributed participation, not ownership of everything, but stewardship of shared resources, not fear as the organizing principle, but trust. Not “how do I survive when everything collapses?” but “How do we make collapse less likely, and life better, together?”

Its about composting the apocalypse – the world really is messy, but fear doesn’t have to become a bunker, it can become a reason to organize. This is where social composting matters, take the accumulated waste of the last decades — #neoliberalism, authoritarianism, #techshit, platform capitalism, political tribalism, broken institutions and the endless fear machine. Don’t pretend it isn’t there, don’t worship it or spend your entire life fighting it head-on. Compost it, break it down, learn from it, keep what is useful, let the dead parts become soil to then grow something different.

The #deathcult says the future belongs to the #nastyfew who can buy their way out, the #lifecult says the future belongs to those who can build relationships strong enough to stay. The choice isn’t really between apocalypse and utopia, it is between bunkering down or building commons. The planet doesn’t need another billionaire bunker, it needs people willing to pick up shovels.

A #mainstreaming view of this

#OMN #openweb #4opens #commons #lifecult #deathcult #dotcons #socialcomposting #KISS

Why “common sense” is a cage – we don’t have to worship this mess

The problem of #dotcons is attention capture, its why #digitaldetox is a part of the #OMN toolbox. So lets look at why we need to act on the digital drug problem. The everyday digital drug fix starts with a notification, you pick up your phone because you get a notification. You unlock it, check the notification. Then maybe you look at one thing, then another, then another and suddenly an hour have disappeared.

You didn’t decide to spend the next hour staring at short videos selected by a #dotcons in the service of the #nastyfew. You didn’t sit down and make a conscious choice to enter the endless scroll, you just responded to a notification. Swipe – maybe this one is rubbish – swipe – that’s funny – swipe – boring – swipe – interesting – swipe – somebody attractive, and on it goes. This is the basic addiction of the #dotcons: turning our attention into a reaction rather than a choice. The important thing isn’t that one particular video is good or bad, the problem is loss of focus.

Every notification creates another injection, every swipe gives the algorithm a signal about what keeps you looking. The drug learns what holds you there, while you gradually lose track of why you picked up the phone in the first place. This isn’t communication in any real way, it’s an attention stealing machine and the more time we spend looking at it, the more normal the behaviour becomes. This is why #DigitalDetox project isn’t about telling people to “use their phones less”, its an AA meeting, we need to understand the drug is difficult to stop.

The phone isn’t the problem – digitaldetox is about #KISS technology to help people have more focus to participate in their communities. This mess we need to composting is social, the technology is a part, and yes the is piles of #techshit but under this surface is blinded ideology – the business model and the social architecture we think of as common sense.

The question is what infrastructure we build around those addictive behaviours, it is the problem with #mainstreaming, that it rarely looks like control from the inside the trap, it looks like common sense. People are presented with acceptable ideas, organizations, technologies and ways of working. Then, because everybody around them makings the same choices, those choices are “natural” – “This is just how things are done.”

But that “common sense” has a history. – for forty years, a mixture of #neoliberalism, #postmodernism, professionalisation and institutional culture has created a particular political and technological environment, that tells us that change should happen through recognized organizations, recognized experts, recognized funding structures and recognized channels.

Alternative paths are not forbidden, they are simply made difficult to see, and when people have spent decades inside this environment, asking them to look outside it can produce strong negative reaction. Then the problem is not simply bad people, it is tempting to describe this as a problem of individual personalities. Someone is arrogant, someone is ideological, someone is a gatekeeper, someone is “woke”, someone is a bureaucrat. But that misses the deeper problem, that people are shaped by the systems they live inside.

If your professional environment rewards certain ideas and punishes others, eventually you learn what can safely be said, learn which projects look fundable, learn which language gets accepted. You learn which organizations are considered legitimate. You also learn which people are worth listening to, its a #KISS social filter. The result is not only a conspiracy, it is something mundane and, more difficult to challenge, a culture reproducing itself. The people keep selecting things that make sense in the current #mainstreaming paths, and become evidence that the current #techshit mess is right all along.

This is one of the traps of #mainstreaming – its the grassroots problem we need to compost – grassroots projects come from somewhere completely different, they are messy, experimental and don’t always have professional language. They are built by people who see a #DIY problem and start doing something about it. That is where interesting alternatives begin, when these projects enter the mainstream funding and organizational environment, something bad happens. The project is asked to translate itself, then translate itself again to fit into a recognized category, demonstrate impact, scalability, governance, sustainability etc.

Then comes the compleat #block, it has to demonstrate that it already looks like something the funder understands, by the end, the thing being funded is very different from the thing that originally mattered. This fuck-up is not always malicious, it’s a structural problem of mainstreaming trying to make the unfamiliar familiar, and in doing so, it removes the qualities that made the grassroots project interesting in the first place. When we try and compost this #mainstreaming mess, people become defensive. When you challenge somebody’s “common sense”, you are not challenging an opinion, you may end up challenging their social position, their professional identity and their understanding of how the world works. That feels threatening, so its normal that the response is defensive.

Instead of asking “Could this alternative actually work?” the conversation becomes “Why aren’t you doing this properly?” Then comes the familiar #blocking “Use the proper channels.”“Talk to the right people.” “Get the stakeholders together.” “Build consensus.” “Follow the process.” “That’s not how things work.” And sometimes these are perfectly reasonable suggestions, but sometimes “proper process” is simply #blocking, ensuring that nothing outside the existing system can ever become legitimate.

The #OMN is built from a different starting point, it does not share any assumption that the existing institutions can solve the problems. It starts with people, communities, media and flows to build useful things the people can use, avoiding technical complexity to make participation is possible. We need these native technology’s as tech has its own version of the problem, the #geekproblem that assumes, if something is technically possible, the technical architecture should determine how people behave. This is the way power accumulates around administrators, developers, institutions and large communities, it is social. Thus, simply making something “open source” does not automatically make it socially open.

It is why #4opens matters, open data, open source, open standards and open processes are not the whole answer, but they can create space for communities to make their answers. Mediation rather than control, the answer to messy human behaviour is not more control. The #OMN is closer to a river than a filing cabinet, objects flow, people contribute to the flow, communities filter and shape the flow. Different places can create different views of the same underlying information. Some things become trusted – some things remain uncertain. Some things disappear from a particular view without pretending that they have magically ceased to exist everywhere.

This is a very different idea of network governance, its organic, its about composting the mess. The #openweb has accumulated decades of corporate platforms, closed APIs, surveillance economics, status games, technological churn, institutional habits and ideological baggage. There is a huge pile of shit, the answer is not to pretend otherwise, we compost it, take what is useful, break down what is harmful. Reuse existing tools, keep the lessons, discard the assumptions to help grow something new from what remains.

That is a more practical form of radicalism than simply traditional #fashionista left declaring that everything has to be destroyed and rebuilt from zero. It is also why #KISS matters, keep it simple, make the useful thing work. The real challenge to compost is cultural, the barrier to alternative technology is often not technology it self, it is the problem of common sense imagination. People need to imagine that things could work differently, then after this grassroots paths need space to experiment, to grow, before they are forced into the current #mainstreaming.

Funders like #NLnet need to recognize that something can be valuable before it has already become institutionally respectable. And #mainstreaming organizations need to understand that they are not the source of innovation, as to often they are the last people to notice this, that does not mean abandoning them, but it means not making them the only path.

So the question becomes, how can we convince them to build real alternatives, we can just to spend another twenty years trying to convince a closed system that it should become open. The path out of this mess is simple build something open, don’t waist to much time and focus explaining to institutions why grassroots communities deserve infrastructure. And don’t wait for “the right people” to give permission, start with the people who are already doing the work.

The important shift is from permission to participation, from ownership to commons, from control to mediation, from platforms to flows. From mainstreaming the grassroots into existing institutions to letting grassroots practice grow outward into the wider culture. The existing “common sense” can be composted, it is not inevitable, it is simply what has grown around us, to become a mess. We don’t have to worship the mess, we can pick up a shovel, turn the pile, let it breathe and grow something better from it.

Which Nature Are We Growing?

There is such a thing as reality, and humans have an intrinsically limited idea of what it actually is. All human thought and culture are created by humans. In that process, there is a strong tendency for our ideas to become religion, things we believe to be true rather than things we keep testing.

The West developed a useful hack to try to escape this trap. Religions are built around truth. Science is built around doubt. Make an observation. Test it. Try to prove yourself wrong. Keep the results. Let someone else test them. This simple hack has worked VERY well – for good and for evil. Science doesn’t tell us what we should do. That’s the next problem.

Morality.

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.

An example of how #FOSS works

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