This post is talking in the sense of structure rather than individual experience. Let’s be honest, much of the so-called “alternative” tech scene is still stuck. Yes, we fled the #dotcons for something better, but ended up with copies of the same broken models. The #Fediverse, with all its potential, is still as often dominated by “mainstreaming meta” chat (“Twitter refugees incoming!”) or conspiracy-laden, #fashionista rabbit holes. It’s little wonder that even the nerdy privacy crowd struggles to find meaningful content or community. And no, shouting “fuck the system!” isn’t enough.
If we’re serious about systemic change, we need to do much more. The question is not if people will come, some always will, the real challenge is what they’ll find when they get here. Right now? It’s messy, insular, and missing the tools people need to use for change and challenge, let alone feel at home. We must move beyond building clones of corporate platforms and start composting the path that got us here.
This is why we need a reboot, not from scratch, but from memory. Projects like #indymediaback aim to reclaim 20+ years of working grassroots media practice. With tools like #ActivityPub we now have scalable tech that can bring those old social processes – based on #4opens (open code, open data, open governance, open standards) – into the present. The #OMN (Open Media Network) is such a path: combining the solid tech foundations with the radical social methods that we know worked (but didn’t scale).
To move at all, we must change and challenge the toxic norms of the #mainstreaming#deathcult, and yes, this means building real alternative identities and spaces that don’t live in the shadow of big tech. Being “alternative” used to mean something, and it can again, if we stop ONLY copying the mainstream and instead focus on nurturing something more strongly rooted and real.
This isn’t about being purist, #FOSS and Open Source already works in this way, the #OMN just brings this path to media and community infrastructure. It’s not utopian, it’s compost. And yes, that means dealing with hard questions, including our own funding. Let’s stop pretending we’re neutral when we’re not. Let’s build from honesty. It’s time to dig, plant, grow, and repeat.
NOTE: the comments below are a useful example of #stupidindividualism, and remember this hashtag is about social groups and their #blocking of social thinking. The history matters, flaming is not a useful response.
We always need fast flowing counter currents, as the #mainstreaming narrows the field of imagination and excludes non-conforming ideas that could offer real solutions to systemic crises. Mainstreaming smooths the rough edges of society. It normalizes hierarchy, filters dissent, and packages politics into manageable narratives. It’s how radical demands are turned into reforms, then paperwork, then slogans, then forgotten.
Absorbing opposition into bureaucracy (e.g., NGOs, dead end consultancy)
Rewarding compromise and incrementalism, as blocking
Silencing or caricaturing grassroots resistance, as common sense
Making real alternatives seem "unrealistic", in the end
This is why active grassroots #DIY matters as a counterbalance. On this path, anarchism is not just rebellion or chaos, it is a living working tradition of thinking and organizing that keeps change alive when mainstreaming works continuously to bury it.
Direct democracy, In a world of managed participation and elitist mediation, anarchism says: decide together, act together. It reminds us of grassroots power that doesn’t flow through institutions but grows in assemblies, co-ops, camps, and communities.
Mutual aid and cooperation, where mainstream narratives focus on competition, profit, and security through control, anarchism champions care, solidarity, and trust-based networks, a needed cultural shift to navigate crisis and collapse.
Decentralization of power, in the face of #dotcons, technocracy, and corporate-state collusion, anarchism is a map toward decentralization and autonomy. It’s the logic behind federated systems, commons governance, and resilient localism.
Critique of state power, mainstreaming always ends up strengthening state structures, even when it claims to oppose them. Anarchism pulls back the curtain on the violence and coercion baked into “order”, whether in border regimes, policing, or “benevolent” welfare systems.
To make this work we need the idea of cultural compost: “We need anarchists unencumbered by anarchism.” at its best this isn’t an identity, it’s a provocation, a composting force movements from hardening into systems of control.
This is why balance is key, without radical, un-mainstreamed perspectives, the so-called “left” drifts into hollow #NGO work, tech utopianism, or sanitized liberalism. The #openweb becomes a product instead of a commons, movements become brands, justice becomes PR. Balancing #mainstreaming means, keeping the imagination alive, creating space for alternatives and building systems that don’t replicate domination
In practice, projects like the #OMN and #4opens are examples of this balance: using basic tech to empower trust, not control. They are rooted in values of rebooting the #openweb, with the cultural DNA of anarchism, without necessarily the costume. We need people unafraid to challenge power, even when everyone else says, “play nice, get the grant, follow the roadmap.” So yes, we need anarchism, not as a lifestyle, but as a counterweight, a cultural inoculation against decay, to challenge the centre from the edge.
And we need to compost the rest.
The mess we make trying to move away from the mainstream…
“Doing the same thing in the same context and expecting different results is one of the clinical definitions of insanity.” 😄
The truth is, we’ve already solved many of these problems. From grassroots media to consensus decision-making, from tech co-ops to decentralized organizing, we had working solutions. What we lacked was a way to scale them without breaking them. That was always the sticking point. But the irony: the activist culture that once created these solutions has eroded, just as the tech finally caught up, the tech is ready, it’s the culture missing. This is the mess we’re in now.
It’s about social trust, human-scale processes, messy cooperation, and doing things differently, this time with tools that match our values, not burying them. Let’s stop acting insane, let’s try something new, but built from something old.
If we want to build meaningful alternatives, we must deal with difficult issues head-on. Sweeping things under the carpet – especially in radical spaces – always comes at a cost.
One of the more complex, and often misused, areas is around identity politics, particularly the playing of the race/gender card in ways that obscure rather than clarify the real issues at stake.
Let’s be clear: systemic racism and sexism are real. We all live with the deep, painful legacies of colonialism, patriarchy, and class oppression. These power structures are embedded in our cultures, our institutions, and, yes, in our own organizing spaces. Naming and addressing them is vital.
But sometimes, identity markers are used as shields, not in the pursuit of justice, but to avoid accountability. When this happens, especially in grassroots or activist collectives, it creates paralysis and prevents us from dealing with actual abuse of power.
A real-world example. This happened to me some years ago at a community-run space in Dalston. One person dominated meetings, spoke over others, and made every decision-making process a battleground. It was classic power politics, silencing others through constant assertion and manipulation.
When I finally took responsibility to challenge this, the room froze. Instead of engaging with the issue, some defaulted to “both sides are equally problematic.” Then, when pressure built, he played the race card, asserting that my criticism was racially motivated. No one knew how to respond. The conversation shut down. I became “the problem.” He continued unchecked.
It took 6 months of dysfunction and damage to the project before he was finally removed from collective meetings. In the end, people realised: yes, he was mentally unwell, addicted, controlling, and yes, he had useful skills. But we had all failed to support him and the group because we didn’t deal with the real power dynamics early and honestly.
Hard truths, sometimes someone uses identity-based arguments not as a reflection of structural injustice, but as a way to deflect accountability. When that happens, we can end up with unchallengeable behaviour patterns that destroy collectives from within. This doesn’t mean ignoring or downplaying racism, sexism, or mental health, far from it. It means being brave enough to hold multiple truths at once:
Someone can be from a marginalised background and be acting out of line.
Someone can be struggling with mental health and still be causing harm.
Power politics doesn’t disappear just because it’s wrapped in the language of social justice.
What Can We Learn?
Deal with issues when they come up. Don’t defer hard conversations. Don’t wait for people to burn out.
Support everyone – including people acting out – with clear boundaries, not blanket exclusion or indifference.
Distinguish real oppression from manipulative tactics. It’s not easy, but it’s essential to long-term health of communities.
Don’t collapse into false equivalences – not every confrontation is “two monsters fighting.” Trust your political instincts.
Ultimately, we need to reclaim the messy, complicated work of building trust, of calling in rather than calling out, and of recognising power wherever it appears, even when it wears familiar or “progressive” clothing. We won’t fix any of this with purism or purity politics. We’ll do it by grounding ourselves in collective care, lived experience, and honest struggle.
To use technology as a part of this social change, we need better working with the #dotcons generation. This generation is a mess. No surprise after 20+ years of submission to the #deathcult:
#Neoliberalism hollowed out our economies and replaced solidarity with consumerism. #Postmodernism fragmented identity into a battlefield of individualism over collective action. #Dotcons centralized control, turning the internet into a corporate surveillance machine.
The real question is: how do we break free? When our #fashernistas still dodge this, trapped in cycles of performative activism, #NGO co-option, and endless distraction.
The activist path out of this mess is not more chasing trendy tech stacks or branded illusions of progress. What we need is a grounded, #KISS path forward, #OMN (Open Media Network) to building grassroots, independent media beyond corporate platforms. #4opens for transparency, collaboration, and trust baked into our tech + social governance. And, reclaiming #DIY activism real-world organizing, not just digital spectacle.
We don’t need more #geekproblem “fixes” or slick branding #PR exercises. We need radical, collective agency. The tools are here, let’s build.
The old flower beds of #Indymedia lie fallow, not dead. The seeds are still there, beneath layers of neglect, factionalism, and the noise of 20 years of failed “alternatives.” What we need now is not revolution or reinvention, but revival. A slow, careful re-rooting in the fertile ground of experience.
We don’t need to tear it down or rebuild from scratch. Almost all of what worked between 2000–2008 still works today, at least 90% of the original social structure is sound. Let’s focus instead on the missing 10%, the gaps that were never resolved. That’s where the real energy and creativity are needed. That’s where trust, experimentation, and diversity of tactics should guide us.
Change with Care: Soft Hands, Open Eyes – In today’s tech-social landscape, even the slightest structural changes can lead to rips and tears. And once those start, the momentum of destruction escalates. We’ve seen this over and over again: dogmatic reinvention, ego-driven platforms, over-complex redesigns, and every time, we’re left with more fragmentation and less power. Instead, we propose a path of slow change. Work with what already functions. Use the existing structure as a trellis to support new growth.
Let’s be clear:
#4opens is not dogma — it’s the distilled learning of 30 years of open-source and open-process practice.
#PGA Hallmarks are not just ideals — they’re the living legacy of thousands of grassroots organisers across decades and continents.
#Indymedia isn’t a romantic memory — it’s the real-world, working outcome of diverse radical media groups building something that worked.
Indymedia only fell when it forgot the principles it was built on. When the foundations faded, it couldn’t flex under pressure, from internal disagreements or external attack. Let’s not make that mistake again.
Old Tools, New Wisdom – We don’t need saviours with shiny ideas. We need comrades with shovels. We need “elders” who are kind and sharp, who know when to step forward and when to stay quiet. Let’s embrace our role in this: gently holding the centre path, not controlling it. When someone passionate comes forward with a “better” idea, let’s respond with:
“How does that work with the #4opens?”
“Does it move us toward the PGA hallmarks?”
If it does, let’s try it. If not, let’s compost it and try again. That’s the rhythm of real change.
Expect Mess. Build Anyway – Let’s not sugar-coat it. We live in a world collapsing under its own contradictions. #Brexit, #ClimateChaos, the digital enclosure of the commons, these aren’t trends, they’re symptoms of systemic failure. And into that storm, every grassroots effort will be met with confusion, conflict, and co-option.
Expect:
People driven by petty grudges and personal agendas.
NGOs smothering action with managerialism.
#Stupidindividualism hijacking community energy.
Waves of right-wing actors using open platforms better than the left.
The approach: Focus and fertility – The Open Media Network (#OMN) exists to nourish, not replace. It’s a shovel to compost the piles of #techshit and #NGO mess. It’s a network for linking what already works and rediscovering the strength of shared infrastructure.
This is what makes #IndymediaBack different from other “radical” tech revivals?
It’s built on lived practice, not theory.
It’s structured for diversity, not conformity.
It’s based on human trust, not techno-fetishism.
It’s deeply political — anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, rooted in care and collaboration.
Yes, this is slow work, there will be times when things get ugly, when howling mobs throw shit, metaphorically and otherwise. Our job is to stay calm, stay focused, and keep the compost warm. Reviving Indymedia is not about nostalgia. It’s about learning from what worked, and building with care on that foundation. Let’s dig in. Let’s grow something together.
The “common sense” of mainstreaming #deathcult worship is one thing. But on a different side, i’m getting bored – and honestly frustrated – with people constantly throwing academic articles and dense theory into conversations about practical grassroots change. If academic knowledge worked in the real world, we wouldn’t be stuck in a permanent state of crisis. We wouldn’t be burning out. We wouldn’t be watching every radical initiative slowly get co-opted, neutralised, then forgotten.
The truth is obvious: most academic frameworks don’t translate well into real-life practice. They to often abstract away the people, the politics, the pain, and the actual doing. And when you try to impose this abstract knowledge onto the messy, complex world of activism, it two often backfires, badly.
Example: The Horizontalist Trap – We’ve all been in those consensus meetings that take hours because someone read a paper on “formal process” and insists we follow it to the letter. The outcome? People walk away frustrated, nothing gets done, and the only ones who benefit are those with time, education, or social power, the exact opposite of what the theory promised.
Example: The NGOization of Resistance – Academics love to talk about power and hegemony, then take funding from the same institutions that perpetuate the problems. They publish papers about “grassroots voice” while never showing up to a single protest, occupation, or food distribution.
Worse still, academic frameworks often become the justification for #NGO “best practices”, which means measurable, fundable, easily controlled deliverables that neuter real resistance and keep everything nice and “professional.” Look at the climate movement’s NGO wing, all form, no fire.
Example: The Misuse of Radical Jargon – Words like “intersectionality,” “decolonisation,” “assemblage,” and “ontology” are thrown around like power spells. But, they act like a fog machine, confusing, not clarifying. They become tools for gatekeeping rather than building any usable shared understanding.
This isn’t to say these ideas are worthless. But if they aren’t grounded in practice, in lived reality, in #DIY doing, they become another form of control, the academic equivalent of bureaucratic jargon, empty of any power.
Let’s talk about practice – If you’re serious about radical change, start with what people are actually doing. Watch how trust is built, how disagreements are handled, how collective tools succeed or fail. This is the terrain of useful knowledge. Theory should grow from practice, not the other way around.
This is the basis of the #DIY approach. It’s what grounds #OMN, #IndymediaBack, and the #4opens framework. These projects didn’t come from a PhD thesis, they came from struggle, failure, and iteration on the ground. They work because they grow from this practice.
So to sum up, please stop adding to the mess – when you post academic articles without any connection to what’s happening in the real world, you’re not helping. You’re contributing to the noise, to inertia, to the pile of unread PDFs and emails sitting in everyone’s guilt folders.
Instead:
Link to practical guides, not just papers.
Summarise ideas in accessible ways, not just as a show of “knowledge”.
Relate theory back to what people are already doing.
And most of all, ask first: Is this helping, or is this just feeding my own need to be heard?
We really don’t need more theory right now, we need fire, tools, and compost. If you must bring theory, make sure it’s something that came from someone doing the work. Otherwise, maybe save it for the seminar room.
We’re building from the bottom, get your hands dirty, join us there.
If you’ve ever tried to build something radical, collective, and actually useful, you’ve run into strong #blocking forces. They’re not just annoying, they’re dangerous, structural, and they always show up. This post is about naming those, calling them what they are, and understanding how they’re entangled in the wider problem:
A culture that valorizes individualism, feeds on careerism, and bows to the false “common sense” of the neoliberal #deathcult.
The #NGO agenda: Careerism in activist clothing, highlights how too many grassroots projects are co-opted by well-meaning (or not-so-well-meaning) NGOs and their functionaries, who come waving grant forms and talking about partnerships. But really, they’re selling a diluted, bureaucratic version of change that fits inside capitalist institutions, with jobs and funding flows to protect.
At best, they water down radicalism into “deliverables.” At worst, they actively trample grassroots horizontality to build careers. They normalize the #dotcons. They manage, rather than transform. This isn’t conspiracy, it’s structure. And we need to build outside this deadened swamp.
What keeps this hard to see is the petty politics and personal grudges, as micro-level sabotage, let’s be honest, some people would burn the future to win a petty feud. This is the everyday rot of #stupidindividualism, where narrow self-preservation and shallow ego become more important than collective progress.
Projects like #indymediaback, which depend on shared vision and mutual respect, break down when people refuse to grow beyond grudges. These behaviours reflect deeper cultural damage, we’ve been trained to see each other as threats, not collaborators. #KISS we can’t build anything real if we don’t actively mediate this. That means talking it through, holding space, calling it in, before it derails the work.
The liberal trap is about dogma masquerading as “common sense”. I’ll say something unfashionable, I have respect for old-school liberalism. It gave us social safety nets, education, some rights, a lot of good stuff came out of liberal traditions. But today’s dogmatic liberals, clinging to broken institutions and smearing “common sense” over radical action, are a drain on movement energy. Their default is always compromise, always moderation, even when the world is on fire. We’re stuck negotiating with people who believe the future is a reformed version of the past. It isn’t. We need to move forward, not beg to stay where we are.
The #geekproblem is about control, complexity, and disconnection. We’ve talked about this before, and it keeps coming up. The #geekproblem is when technologists build tools for control rather than empowerment, for complexity rather than access, for themselves rather than people. Often dressed in “neutral” language or “perfect systems,” these tools lock out users, deny social context, and kill collaboration with arrogant assumptions. The fix? Build for people, not machines. Use the #4opens. Work from #DIY practice, not just theory. Centre community. Make it work for the bottom, not only the top.
The path we need is compost isn’t about perfection. We need to admit we’ve all played roles in the mess. The key is naming it, owning it, and moving differently. Tools like #OMN, #indymediaback, and #OGB are not ONLY shiny new things. They’re grounded in lived practice, built to solve real problems. They don’t pretend to be magic fixes, they are basic shovels, to compost the current mess, to old space to grow something better.
Let’s get on with composting the #tecsit. We don’t need another app, another platform, another paper. We need to build trust-based networks, support each other, and get our hands dirty together. If we work for it, a humanistic future is still possible, to make this happen we need to stop feeding the #deathcult and start feeding the soil.
Add your thoughts in the comments: What Blocks the progressive path? We need to name these issues clearly, not to shame individuals, but to make them visible as systemic patterns we all get caught in. So tell me: what else is holding us back? What sabotages collective projects from within? Let’s document the patterns so we can start composting them.
There’s a common confusion, pushed by well-meaning #fashernistas, about how change actually happens. They love theory. They love to talk about change. But when it comes to doing, things go sideways. Why? Because good horizontalists know: theory must emerge from practice, not the other way around.
At the root of radical practice is #DIY culture. We don’t wait for perfect theory or academic approval. We get our hands dirty. We try things, we fail, we try again. Through this, we build theory that is grounded in reality, not floating above it.
The Problem with top-down theory is that when you start from theory alone, disconnected from lived experience, you go ground and round in abstract circles. Then, inevitably, someone tries to apply this neatly wrapped theoretical package as a “solution” to the mess we’re in… and it breaks everything.
At best, this leads to another layer of #techshit to compost. At worst, it becomes academic wank, beautifully phrased but practically useless, imposed on grassroots organisers trying to get real work done. We’re tired of clearing up after these failed interventions. Focus matters. Resources are scarce. Energy is precious. The practice-first approach, is why we’re doing something different with projects like:
#OMN (Open Media Network): building tools from the bottom up, with open metadata flows and radical trust.
#Indymediaback: rebooting a proven model of grassroots publishing that worked, updated for today.
#OGB (Open Governance Body): prototyping governance based on lived collaboration, not abstract debate.
All of this is theory grown from practice. None of it came from think tanks or grant-funded consultants. It came from kitchens, camps, squats, TAZs, mailing lists, and dirty hands. If you want to be part of this work, great. But please engage with it as it is. Bring your experience, your skills, your curiosity. But don’t dump disconnected theory on it. Don’t smother the flow with top-down frameworks or overthought abstractions.
We need people to join the flow of practice. Let the theory emerge where it’s needed, like compost, growing what feeds us. So: Start where your feet are. Build from what works. Trust the process of doing. And please, don’t push mess our way. We’ve got enough of that already.
Everyone knows we are in a mess, but most people are too distracted to do anything to change this. Most of us keep on this path – scrolling, clicking, consuming – because the current mess we live in is incredibly skilled at hiding consequences.
The environmental cost is buried under greenwashing. BP rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum.” Shell sponsors art galleries. Apple makes claims about “carbon-neutral” devices, then glues batteries shut to prevent repair. Meanwhile, rare earth extraction, e-waste, and fast fashion destroy ecosystems from Congo to Cambodia.
The labour cost is outsourced, invisibilized, atomized. Amazon warehouse workers urinate in bottles to keep pace with surveillance timers. Foxconn installs suicide nets around dorms. Uber calls drivers “partners” while avoiding all responsibility for their lives or livelihoods.
The mental health cost is reframed as personal failure. You’re anxious and burnt out? Must be your mindset. Try a mindfulness app. Maybe eat better. Maybe “grind smarter.” Meanwhile, the structure of your life, precarious work, information overload, climate dread, is never questioned.
The social collapse is blamed on the “irresponsible poor” or “divisive politics.” Communities are gutted by austerity, housing is hoarded by speculators, but you’re told it’s your neighbour’s fault, immigrants, the unemployed, the other political tribe. The system throws fuel on every fire, then lectures you on “civility.”
Every crisis becomes your problem, not the system’s. This is because the #deathcult we unconsciously worship doesn’t just produce stuff, it produces numbness, distraction, and above all, thoughtlessness. A never-ending now, stripped of memory and consequence.
And the moment you try to pull back the curtain? There’s a brand, an #NGO ready to sell you “resistance” too. It’s a system designed to make rebellion feel like a clone lifestyle choice.
A t-shirt with a slogan.
A rainbow flag slapped on a weapons manufacturer.
A “climate justice” conference sponsored by Shell.
A new Netflix docuseries about the thing you’ll forget by next week.
#KISS resistance requires more than outrage, we don’t just need better tech or better politics. We need:
Better attention — to what's real and what's propaganda
Slower thinking — against the churn of hot takes and algorithms
Reclaimed time — stolen back from platform metrics and work schedules
Spaces for consequence — where the impacts of our actions (or inactions) are visible, shareable, accountable
That’s why #DIY infrastructure, the commons, and openness, matter. That’s why we reboot the #openweb, with the #4opens, with the #OMN, with peer-to-peer tools, and with each other. And we need to do this before thoughtlessness becomes all we have left in the #mainstreaming mess.
Ten years ago, I remember being told, often condescendingly, with smug certainty, that hosting in the cloud was the future, and that what I was working on, #DIY grassroots, self and community hosted tech was the dinosaur, a dead end, old obsolete thinking, out of touch. Despite spending years pointing out the obvious flaws in this thinking, I got only that my “native” path was irrelevant, for Luddites, they said. Legacy thinking, dead tech walking.
Well, here we are, a decade later. And guess what the cloud: It was expensive, less performant, less secure, and a gateway to increasingly exploitative pricing models. This isn’t hindsight bias, the warning signs were always there. But many #fahernista and #geekproblem people get caught up in the glossy surface and tech hype mess, repeating the same mistake we’ve made across generations of #geekproblem tech, believing scale and #PR buzzwords were synonymous with any progress at all.
Let’s now be clear on what actually happened.
We handed over infrastructure to a handful of giant platforms that lock us in and bleed us dry.
We lost resilience, any sovereignty, and basic control over our own data.
We normalized rent-seeking as a business model.
We pushed decentralization off a cliff and called it “abstraction.”
Meanwhile, local compute got cheaper, storage exploded in affordability, bandwidth costs continued to fall, #dotcons threats increased. And guess what? Running things locally started making sense again, just like it always does when the #PR smoke and mirrors clears.
The lesson, which we need to now bring to #crypto and #AI, just because something is fashionable doesn’t make it in any way real or sustainable. That tech #PR hype cycles aren’t innovation, it’s marketing. And when you stop looking at the core trends (cost, control, resilience) and just ride the buzz, you’ll end up where we are now, mess, bloated budgets, shrinking trust, and a growing #techshit pile to clean up.
As ever we need to re-learn the value of #KISS grounded thinking, to remember that local, #4opens, transparent, and interoperable #openweb systems aren’t retro, they’re essential. This isn’t about nostalgia for the old paths, It’s about having power over our basic infrastructure again. The cloud, at the time and in looking over our shoulders, was smoke and mirrors, a detour, it’s now past time to get back on the real progressive #Fediverse path.
Here’s a small but powerful challenge for #openweb builders – and a perfect #DIY project if you’re fed up with the current #geekproblem. I’ve been trying to find #Fediverse instances that actually cover my town, Oxford, UK, so I can help promote and grow them locally. You’d think this would be simple, right? But… nope.
Why is this happening? Because our current tools focus only on technical facts (server specs, software used, uptime, etc.) and ignore the uncontrolled (dangerous) metadata that actually makes discovery meaningful:
What’s the instance for?
Who does it serve?
What community does it represent?
Where is it rooted geographically or socially?
This is the #geekproblem in action: great code, but no way to find things people actually want to use. What’s the fix? Someone (maybe you?) creates a community-focused discovery tool that:
Encourages instance admins to tag with location, community, topics, etc.
Provides search/filter UI that works for real people, not sysadmins
Maybe even integrates with OpenStreetMap or a simple opt-in geo-tagged registry
Outputs something friendly – like “Find your Fediverse community in your town”
This is not a hard project, it’s a weekend hack for someone who cares, but it has social value as it helps bridge infrastructure to lived communities. This need to be at the core of the #openweb reboot.
So for people who can’t see why this matter. If we want the Fediverse to grow beyond techies and Twitter refugees, we need to help people find their people, local discovery is key. Place-based communities are still powerful, especially when rebuilding trust, mutual aid, and shared media in a collapsing world.
So, want a simple mission? Build a tool that helps people find #Fediverse instances by town, city, or region. Start with Oxford, but make it global. Make it open. Make it federated. And when you do? I’ll be the first to push it out.
Region (countries are regions, anti-nationalistic)
City/area (a county or city)
local (village, area in city)
Them maybe latter hyper local (but not for now)
Then we have subject – it would be normal to have a multi subject hashtag map, that updates on each click – adding the clicks to a list on the side – with “new button” to jump back to start.
Then you have advanced for the normal tech stuff… which currently is the front end on most pickers. This would also be displayed on the info box for each instance on the map, so still central, just not AT THE FRONT.
UPDATE: can just pull all the existing data out of the current sites like https://instances.social/list#lang=en&allowed=&prohibited=&min-users=&max-users= as these are all #4opens. So the projected site could be up and running with full data in little time. Yes, you would have to ask people to tag their installs to geolocate their instances. This could be done a hard way or a simple #KISS way like any admin in the instance adding a #hashtag with a geolocation hashtag after it. Then periodically go through the instance list and spider all admins on each instance if you find the hashtag – add the next hashtag as a geolocation or something as #KISS simple as this. What is your idea?
Ideas in comments, please.
UPDATE: this is this one https://fediverse.observer/map works better still nothing in Oxford – it seems to be pretty random with little relevance to subject and area, is it by IP address eo location, that would be #geekproblem
Themes: Climate migration, class war, migrant displacement, urban decay and adaptation, history repeating, social justice, collapse vs. transformation, DIY survival vs. institutional decay.
A post #climatechaos utopia/dystopia history of a small English town.
Timeline: THE RISING
High Ground, Low Future (2030–2040) • Begin with heavy rains and seasonal flooding becoming semi-permanent. • Newly built luxury flats on the floodplain (south and west Oxford) are damaged repeatedly, insurance pulled. • Middle-class families flee toward the older high ground of central Oxford, historically preserved college land. • Shortages emerge: housing, resources, space. The city’s delicate balance starts to tilt.
The Forgotten Periphery • Council estates and outer-suburbs, once neglected, now sink under economic collapse and water. • Local government, under austerity and national decline, offers only band-aids. • The media begins labelling displaced middle-class as “flood migrants.” Old class lines blur, but resentments remain.
Inflows (2040–2050) • Waves of international refugees arrive from southern Europe, North Africa, and beyond, fleeing unlivable heat, drought, and war. • They are pushed into the same abandoned, waterlogged spaces, flood basements, condemned buildings, unlivable prefab housing. • Tensions rise. Local institutions (universities, NGOs) create “managed zones” but lack democratic accountability.
PART TWO: THE CRACKING WALLS
Fortress Colleges • As central Oxford densifies, colleges physically re-fortify: fences, walls, biometric gates. • Students become increasingly isolated and elitist, a class divorced from the town they inhabit. • The university brands itself as a “climate solutions hub” while hoarding resources behind gates. • “Town and gown” tensions explode, again, as they have historically.
Survival Zones • #DIY mutual aid emerges on the periphery: squatted schools, rooftop farming, open food kitchens. • A rewilded floodplain becomes a hybrid of anarchic camp, cultural experiment, and survival zone. • #OMN-style p2p networks flourish, local comms, barter systems, radical #openmedia. • People from town and refugee groups begin building new alliances.
Crime and Resistance • As collapse deepens, black markets and violent survival economies grow. • A new urban underclass mixes class, background, and migration stories. • Armed policing returns. Protest turns to riot. A hybrid class-based rebellion takes shape.
PART THREE: THE NEW COMMONS
Walls Come Down (2060–2070) • A symbolic and literal breach of one of the oldest college walls (perhaps Magdalen or All Souls). • Historic parallels to the English Civil War, Chartism, and 1968 are drawn by media and rebels alike. • The breach isn’t just destruction, it opens a negotiation. Some colleges split, others double down.
New Governance Experiments • The city fractally reorganizes: into commons-based neighborhoods, flooded zones governed by cooperatives, and surviving elite zones. • #OGB and #4opens principles emerge as part of new grassroots councils and open documentation of resources and decisions. • Old institutions adapt or fall, Oxford becomes an unlikely testbed for post-collapse co-governance.
Epilogue: Memory and Flow (2080s) • A narrator looks back, possibly a second-gen refugee or an ex-college student who defected. • The floodplains are now permanent water-urban hybrids, people live, float, and thrive amid ruin. • The colleges that survived are museums or cooperatives. Others are ruins. • Oxford is no longer a university town, it is a city of memory, mess, and mutuality. • “The river won,” the narrator says. “And so did we, in the end. But only by letting go of what we were trying to hold onto.”
Character Arcs
• Leila – Teenage refugee who becomes an organiser in the rewilded zones. From scavenger to community focus.
• Tom – Displaced academic’s son, who rejects the college class and becomes a chronicler of the commons.
• Dr. Carter – Disillusioned researcher who defects from the university to join the resistance.
• Abigail Crowthorne – academic turned dictator
Last years floods in Oxford
The Story
Introduces two of the protagonists – Tom and Leila – at a moment when the waters are rising and the old world is visibly breaking apart.
Chapter One: The Waters Came Back
Oxford, 2039. It had been raining for ten days. Not the gentle English drizzle of postcards and nostalgia. This was weight. Sheets of water crashing down in sudden violence, followed by hours of warm, oppressive mist. The kind of rain that sounded like static, like a broken signal. The kind that made you forget what dry felt like. Tom stood at the top of the Botley Ralway Bridge, shivering under a borrowed poncho, staring out at what used to be Oxford’s latest luxury housing development. “The Oxmoor Residences,” the billboard still proclaimed, water-stained and rusting. Behind it: rows of identical pale-brick buildings, their basements already submerged, their ground floors filling with thick brown water.
People had started calling this area “the bathtub.” Everyone said it with the same bitter half-joke. Half because it was funny to see posh flats drown. Half because some of them had lived there until last week.
His family had been lucky. Or connected. Or both. His dad, Professor Carter, still had access to rooms in the Merton College outer quad, though now it was just them. His mother had moved to Edinburgh, with a job and another life. Tom hadn’t gone. He liked the old city. Or had. Now, it felt like a ghost in slow motion. The water wasn’t receding. The storm drains were full. The rivers, the Thames and the Cherwell, had merged west of Christ Church Meadow. Parts of the medieval core were sandbagged. The colleges had hired private security to patrol the entrances. Outsiders were being turned away. Even some insiders. This was the future, everyone said. “The new normal,” the BBC called it, which was code for: Get used to it. You’re on your own.
At street level, below the bridge, something moved. Tom spotted her as she dragged a shopping trolley across a shallow stream that had once been a car park. A girl, no older than him, soaking wet, hood up, trousers caked in mud. She was pulling tarpaulin over a bike frame welded to a makeshift raft, where plastic crates and jerry cans were strapped down with bungee cords.
She looked up. Their eyes met, a pause. “Need help?” Tom called, more out of reflex than intention. She frowned. “Not unless you’ve got dry socks.” Tom half-laughed, climbing down the slope, sliding a little in the mud.
She didn’t offer a name. Just handed him a crate. “If it tips, I drown. You first.” They moved in silence for a while, ferrying salvaged supplies from one ruined doorway to a more stable stairwell, food tins, medical kits, bundles of wrapped clothes. Everything was damp. Everything smelled of mold.
Only once they were done did she speak again. “You from the stone zoo?” Tom blinked. “The?” “The colleges. Gated fossil farms. Big walls, rich ghosts. You’ve got the look.” He flushed. “I’m… not really part of that.” “Sure,” she said, flatly. “None of you are. Until you are.” He didn’t know what to say to that. Instead, he offered his name. “Tom.” She hesitated, then nodded. “Leila.”
That night, back in the quad, Tom couldn’t sleep. He stood in the shadow of the old city wall, staring at the black water pooling outside the west gate. Somewhere out there, Leila was hunkered down with half a dozen others in the half-collapsed shopping arcade.
Inside the colleges, the power was still on. The Wi-Fi worked. Students were live-streaming lectures about resilience and uploading essays on “ecological modernization.” There was even talk of a partnership with a venture capital firm to develop floating student housing.
Tom couldn’t stop thinking about what Leila had said. Stone zoo. Rich ghosts. And the worst part? She wasn’t wrong. The water was rising, and inside these old walls, everyone was pretending they still lived in the world before. But Tom had been outside. He’d felt the river’s edge under his feet. Change wasn’t coming. It was already here.
Chapter Two: The Dry Floor
The trick to surviving in the “bathtub” was to stay one level above the mold. Leila had learned that in the first week, after squatting a corner unit in the old Westgate Arcade with three other girls from the crossing camp. They found a stairwell with no standing water, raided camping stores before the river swallowed them, and rigged up hammocks and crates like a tree house in a mall.
Now it was her patch. No gangs. No “security.” No college kids with GoPros filming their charity rounds. Just other people like her, refugees with nowhere else to be. Western, southern, whatever. Borders meant nothing now.
She boiled water on a camping stove beside a cracked window, the condensation forming tiny rivers that ran down onto the blanket-coverd floor. The faint hum of solar inverters echoed through the walls, they had three working panels rigged from the old Apple store roof, barely enough to keep the mesh network running. That was the one thing keeping the chaos at bay: #OMN-LocalNode-OX3, the scrappy little flow server they’d found and rebooted last month. A dusty Raspberry Pi from a flooded abandoned hackspace, hidden in a sealed plastic box, it was now running a local news feed, weather alerts, water quality maps, and Wi-Fi mesh bridge for people still on the move. No logins, no tracking, no central control. Everyone just called it the Nest.
She checked her battered e-ink reader, still half-charged from last week’s sun. A new post had just dropped on the Nest from one of the Reading crews: “Silt Line Rising: Don’t trust the Southern Railway embankments – three breaks reported overnight. Heading your way. Store dry food on level three or higher. Filtration tabs being dropped by drone from #OMN-Pool. Signal weak, boost if you can. –Love and rage.”
Leila swore quietly and stood up. “Level three,” she muttered, glancing at their floor-to-ceiling waterline mark, a rainbow of old flood stains, each labelled with date and damage. The highest one, scrawled in red marker, read: “Week 3, Base collapse, Saffy broke leg, water to hip.”
That was when she’d started to understand how the new world worked. Not with governments or #NGOs. Not with police or pity. But with whisper networks and broken devices and actual people making things up as they went, and then sticking to it when the next disaster hit. There was no one to ask for help. So they helped each other.
Later that day, Leila biked, half-paddled, to the edge of the flooded business park where she knew the old Oxford Mutual Aid van had been sighted. It was painted with faded anarchist murals, a kind of folk symbol now. The side read: “We don’t fix systems. We plant wild gardens.” Inside, a woman in her forties with an Irish accent and a sticker covered battered laptop was shouting over the wind: “We’ve got confirmation from the Kent relays! London’s south loop is underwater again. Southbank mesh is dark. Brighton is gone.” Someone swore. Leila stepped in. “I can boost the Redding link. But I need one of your spare nodes.” The woman looked her over, nodding slowly. “Westgate girl, right? Take it. Mesh needs arms and legs more than theories.”
They handed her a battered router, stickered with slogans: #4opens, #DIY, #OMNseed, #NoGatekeepers. Leila grinned. “Tell your coder, this thing still smells like server room and solder.” “We’re the resistance,” the woman shrugged. “Don’t expect polish.”
Back in the arcade, that night, she rewired the new node into their roof antenna, climbing over broken solar panels and soggy roof tiles. By moonlight, she could see the edge of the colleges in the distance, golden windows and flood-lit spires, protected behind stone and guards.
She knew that Tom, that weirdly polite boy with the too-clean coat, was in there somewhere. Probably still trying to pretend history was something you read, not something that flooded into your nabourhood. But out here, in the mess, they weren’t waiting. They were building something else. Something that might just hold.
Chapter Three: Signal Bleed
Tom was not supposed to be here. Not on the NEST. Officially, college networks were sealed, “for information hygiene,” the announcement had said. “To prevent malicious interference from destabilizing actors.” But the truth was, he’d been watching for weeks. Quietly tunnelling out through an old Wi-Fi link that one of the physics dons had stashed in a directional Faraday cabinet, mostly for “civilizational curiosity.” The irony hadn’t gone unnoticed.
He tapped at the keyboard. Mesh signal was weak, bleeding in via bounce relays off the botanic garden’s old windmill antenna. Enough for plain text. The Nest was pulsing.
“Oxford node OX3 reporting flood crest 18cm higher than May average. Van from #OMN-Bristol dropped replacement filtration kits and rapid-test strips. Also a stack of zines with weird poetry and clearer disaster maps than anything from the council.”
Tom blinked. He hadn’t seen poetry in a logistics drop before. Another post caught his eye, newer: “Signal boost active. Arcade mesh live again. Thanks to #Leila_Westgate and crew. We’ll hold line until next silt wave. #DIYinfrastructure#OMNseed”
Leila. He remembered her now, she’d spoken once at a town-hall thing last autumn, a kind of rogue teach-in the college tolerated because it made them look progressive. She had talked about water tables and refugee logistics and dignity like it was a path. Everyone else talked data. She talked dirt and socks. And here she was, holding the damn network together with bike parts and grit. He leaned in. A mesh reply had come back from her node:
“Arcade net is shaky but stable. Relay functional. Can take remote logs if you’re on the loop. Leila out.”
Tom hesitated.
“Leila, I’m in Magdalen tower. Got old maps, power stats, drone cam access, maybe useful. Can’t leave the walls. Too many layers. But I want to help. – Tom” No response. He waited, chewing on the corner of a ration bar he didn’t need but ate out of habit. The computer beeped.
Then a new line:
“If you’re real, send a map overlay with sewer runoff paths and a 3-day wind forecast. That’s how the flood creeps in. Let’s see what you’ve got, tower boy.”
An hour later, Tom sent the file. Two hours after that, it was added to the main Nest node with a tag:
“Highland Intel – Source: #OMNghosttower – reliable so far. Mapping river crawl through data. Good work.”
It was the first time he’d felt useful in weeks. Not clean. Not clever. Not theoretical. Useful.
Somewhere, behind the rebuilt walls and crumbling boundaries, two different ways of life, one cloistered, one composted, had reached across the signal gap. No handshake. No peace accord. Just a small current of trust, carried over IP packet signals and flood-soaked routers. The mesh was alive.
Chapter Four: A Perfect Breakfast
In the Senior Common Room of Magdolan College, everything was just so. The linen napkins, still warm from the press, sat folded like little origami cranes beside the morning papers. The new coffy disperser, affectionately dubbed “Milton”, whirred softly as it prepared frothy oat cortados, each one poured with an elegant tulip of steamed milk.
Professor Abigail Crowthorne was reading The Times. Or rather, she was scanning the digital digest projected onto her reading spectacles while her fingers flicked idly at a fresh croissant. The flood updates, tucked neatly into a sidebar titled “Weather & Civic Affairs,” mentioned a rise in the river levels again, but she didn’t dwell.
“Frightful business,” she muttered, brushing crumbs from her wool slacks. “But the Environment Fellows are tracking it. All in hand.” Around her, others murmured in agreement. The world was, admittedly, in a bit of a muddle, it always had been, hadn’t it? But the college had reserves. Generators. Purifiers. Extra heating. And good people in the right places. Oxford had seen worse, hadn’t it? Someone turned up the radio. A polished BBC voice filtered through:
“…while localized flooding has impacted several areas, no major evacuations are currently planned for central zones. Authorities remind residents to rely on official channels and avoid unauthorized information sources or mesh relays.”
Professor Crowthorne arched an eyebrow, then smiled. “Always someone trying to stir the pot.” A few seats down, a younger lecturer, Dr. Neel Joshi, systems theory, hesitated before biting into his jam scone. “They say the mesh relays are how the southern districts are coordinating now. Since the council apps stopped updating.” “Mesh relays,” scoffed the Dean of Discipline. “You mean tinkerers with antennas and delusions of grandeur. The real problem is miscommunication. Panic travels faster than water, these days.” They all chuckled. Neel didn’t. He’d seen the outer ring, broken levees, sunken flats, on his way in. But speaking up too much in the SCR meant being politely disinvited to things, so he sipped his tea and smiled faintly.
From outside, the sound of distant shouting echoed up the college walls, muffled by double-glazing. Possibly a scuffle near the West Gate again. The porters helped by security would handle it. They always did. The table fell into silence as Milton supplied coffy refills. “Honestly,” said Abigail, “if we focused more on stability, not chaos, perhaps things wouldn’t seem so… dramatic. It’s only change that frightens people.”
Above them, a line of fine old portraits gazed down from varnished oak. Scholars, bishops, bureaucrats, faces from a more certain age. And beneath them, the world was shifting. The college remained, for now, dry and dignified. But the floodwater didn’t care about tenure. It was coming.
Chapter Five: The Signal and the Soil
Leila had never planned to stay. Not in Oxford, not in England, not in the old world at all. She’d come north with her mother when the southern zones began to collapse, first the crops, then the state infrastructure. That was before they called it “climate migration”; back then it was still “relocation support” and “temporary humanitarian adjustment zones.”
Her mother died during the second winter, in a prefab unit outside Luton. Pneumonia. Not enough heat. Not enough care. And Leila, sixteen then, learned what it meant to survive in the margins.
The #OMN network came like a rumour. A whisper passed along burnt-out mesh terminals, traded in encrypted chatrooms that flickered between power outages. Someone gave her a string of codes written on paper, real paper, like in the history books, and said: “Post your witness, and you’ll find others.”
She didn’t understand at first. She posted a video, just raw footage of the floodplain school being torn down for an army logistics depot. No commentary. Just what she saw. It got shared. Then someone reached out, not through likes or follows, but through a node message, a relay whisper. “You’re not alone. You’re a root, growing.”
She didn’t believe in movements then. She’d seen too many #NGO buses, clean logos on rotting streets. But this was different. No central office. No funding campaign. Just people connecting through battered solar rigs and rooftop antennas, trading food maps, water tests, and live footage of the failing levees. It was messy. It was human.
Now, she lived in the old Arcade, a half-sunk shopping mall converted into a mesh node hub and shelter space. She ran live assemblies from a second-hand cam rig. The #OMN had no leader, just news flows. No ideology, just the #4opens: Open data, Open source, Open process, Open standard. And beneath it all, a simple ethic: Don’t fix the system. Compost it.
That morning, she climbed the rusted escalator to the rooftop node and tapped the antenna housing with a wrench. It buzzed, steady. The floodwaters had receded from the lower decks, for now. Down below, families shared breakfast in the food hall garden, lit with jury-rigged LEDs and scraps of plastic. No one had much. But what they had, they shared. A different kind of wealth.
Her headset crackled. “Leila? Signal bounce from Jericho. More movement near the Wall. Could be another push.”
She exhaled. “Copy that. Patch me into the Westside commons. Let’s get eyes on.” As she booted up the #indymedia relay, her thoughts drifted not to revolution or war, but to connection. She’d been lost once, drowned in the noise. Now she was a signal. And she knew others were tuning in.
Chapter Six: Faultlines and Frequencies
Tom wasn’t supposed to be there. He’d slipped through a side gate during one of the #OMN open assemblies in Jericho, not out of rebellion, more like curiosity gone feral. He was from the other side of the Wall, one of the college kids. Son of a civil engineer. Studied philosophy, though he rarely talked about it outside tutorial rooms.
At first, he stuck out like a sore thumb: clean coat, soft hands, over-apologetic. A little too eager. People noticed. Some avoided him. Others mocked him. Leila ignored him, or tried to. She’d seen his type before: the college ones who came down “to help” with their whiteboard ideas and risk assessments. They asked questions like “How do you define community resilience?” while others were busy filtering floodwater or salvaging batteries.
But Tom kept showing up. Quietly. Regularly. He helped with repairs. Carried gear. Didn’t video anything. And crucially – didn’t talk much. That was rare. One night, after a long rebuild session on the mesh repeater node, they ended up on the rooftop together, wrapped in tarps, staring at the water-lit mist rising over the floodplains. “Why are you here?” she asked finally. Tom shrugged. “I’m trying to unlearn a lot.” “From where I’m sitting, it looks like you’ve got everything.” “That’s the lie,” he said. “We live in a curated history museum with electric gates. I started climbing out when I realized the only thing my degree was training me for was to explain why things don’t change.”
That stuck. It wasn’t love at first sight. It wasn’t even trust. But it was real. And in a world of collapsing fictions, real was worth a lot. He stayed. Got his hands dirty. Fumbled with antennas. Burned rice more than once. Leila introduced him slowly to the #OMN core – not through words, but action. He patched together one of the old solar rigs. Taught himself packet routing. She saw in him something rare: the capacity to listen without taking over. And over time, trust grew, not as a gift, but as compost: messy, slow, and alive.
He stopped trying to fix things. Started helping them grow. In the evenings, when the signals quieted and the data drops were logged, they’d sometimes sit by the edge of the Arcade roof, feet swinging, listening to the low drone of wind turbines on the horizon. “Do you think this will hold?” he once asked. Leila looked out over the city, submerged car parks, makeshift gardens, the glowing doted lights of the Commons, and replied: “It doesn’t have to hold forever. Just long enough to root something that can.” He didn’t respond. But he reached out, and their hands met, fingertips cold from the wind. Not a promise. Not a plan. Just a moment. And that was enough.
Chapter Seven: The Cracks Within
Tom had always known the walls were symbolic. But he hadn’t expected them to become literal. When the second ring of checkpoints went up around the old colleges, it was framed as “a protective measure in light of increased pressure on the city.” But everyone inside the ivory bubble understood the subtext: the mess was outside, and the last of “civilized order” was being preserved within. Except order wasn’t holding.
Departments were consolidating. Tutors were vanishing. The AI-augmented oversight system, sold as a partnership with the “Oxford Futures Council”, had turned into a kind of digital dean, issuing compliance reports and behaviour nudges like a grim parody of student welfare.
Tom was getting weary. His dual life, college and Commons, couldn’t last much longer. Rumours were spreading that anyone crossing the threshold too often would be flagged. “Dual allegiances” were under review. It was during one of these increasingly rare visits to his old philosophy building that he met Dr. Neel Joshi.
Joshi had tenure, which meant he was mostly ignored, buried in the back corner of the humanities wing. He taught a seminar on “Post-Collapse Political Imagination” and tinkered with #Ai syteams that no one was interested in any-more. Tom wandered in after following a stray message left on a semi-public #OMN channel:
📍“Riverside Archives, Room 3B. There are still ideas worth preserving. Some of them need burning.”
The door was half open. Inside: books, a teapot balanced precariously on a disused 3D printer. Joshi didn’t look up. “I heard you’ve been spending time with the ones building signal towers in the mist.” Tom froze. “Don’t worry,” Joshi said, finally looking at him. “I’m not interested in snitching. I’m interested in survival.” They spoke for an hour. Then three. Joshi had been watching the #OMN experiments closely. He didn’t trust them entirely, “Decentralisation doesn’t absolve power, it hides it. Be careful where the roots dig.”, but he admired their spirit. “They’re building compost,” he said. “In here, we’re just preserving a curated rot.”
Then came Abigail Crowthorne. She was waiting for Tom outside the archives. She had the polished, angular energy of someone who’d long ago decided the world was broken and should be ruled, not mended. “You’re wasting your time with Joshi,” she said, walking beside him uninvited. “He’s a relic. Romantic anarchist nonsense.” Tom said nothing. “We’re forming a delegation,” she continued. “Students, fellows, thinkers – the ones who see what’s coming. The Council needs new leadership, and we need internal cohesion. There’s a role for you. Provided you pick the right side.”
He stopped walking. “And what side is that?” She smiled, sharp as wire. “The one that wins.”
That night, back at the Commons, Tom didn’t sleep. He sat watching the uplink logs flicker green and red. Thinking of walls. Of floods. Of choices that weren’t really choices at all.
He messaged Leila: “It’s breaking faster than we thought. They’re choosing fear.”
She replied simply: “Then we choose each other. The rest we build.”
Chapter Eight: Terms of Control
Abigail Crowthorne moved fast. That was her skill. While others debated ethics or drafted manifestos, she drafted alliances. Within a week of her conversation with Tom, she had convened a “Strategic Working Group on Collegiate Continuity.” The name was bland. That was deliberate. It let her do what she wanted under the radar of most of the crumbling college bureaucracy.
She wasn’t alone. The group included a mix of early-career AI researchers desperate for funding, a few hardened centre-right historians, and a handful of security consultants with ties to the Thames Arc Stability Board. What united them was a common belief: that order must be maintained, even if it meant automating dissent out of existence.
Their plan was deceptively simple:
1. Use the Council’s AI infrastructure to begin “sentiment mapping” across the flood zone.
2. Classify participants in networks like the #OMN as “emergent influence clusters.”
3. Deploy nudge “civic calibration incentives” - a euphemism for reward-punishment loops.
In short: push people into compliance without them ever seeing the hand that pushed. And they were piloting it already. The beta model – helm’s deep – was being tested on a data feed from the Northway camps, just beyond the Wall. Messages were being re-ranked. Some chats were silently slowed. Discontent, redirected. It wasn’t total control. Just enough to tilt the board.
Abigail stood before her committee with a screen behind her, full of shifting graphs and model projections. “We’re not silencing anyone,” she said with cold precision. “We’re helping communities align with reality. And survival. This is benevolent governance.” Someone asked about ethical oversight. She smiled. “We’ve moved beyond that. This is a post-crisis framework. Norms come later.”
Meanwhile, Tom was done pretending. He skipped the Council’s townhall. Left his ID chip on his desk. Walked straight out of the college gate after curfew. It didn’t matter anymore. The AI wouldn’t flag him, not yet. He still had a few permissions left. Enough to disappear. He walked fast, past the water line where the old business park sat submerged, past the gutted power pylons that now held mesh signal boosters instead of cables.
Calais Refugee Camp by Hamish Campbell
He found Leila in the Commons warehouse, her hands deep in circuitry. The solar relay was being rebuilt again after another localized surge. She looked up, surprised. Then, quietly: “You look like someone who chose.” He nodded. “I did.” She wiped her hands and stepped down from the ladder. “Tell me everything,” she said. “Then we’ll decide what to do about it.” Tom exhaled, not relief, not safety, but something like beginning.
In the floodlands, survival had become a kind of quiet rebellion. The northern periphery, Northway, Marston, Risinghurst, once dull suburban rings, were now fragmented islands scattered between collapsed roads and encroaching waters. The council still issued maps, but they hadn’t updated them in months. The reality was different. Fluid. Like the river that wouldn’t go back in its banks.
In this place, the state’s presence was invisible and constant. No soldiers. No police. Only the slow modulation of digital reality. Messages arriving out of order. Requests vanishing from public feeds.
Meetings drawing no one – because notifications never came. helm’s deep was already here.
It didn’t silence you. It isolated you. A few people noticed. Most didn’t. But the pattern was clear. Leila had been tracking the anomalies, flagged by a cluster of mesh nodes that showed curious packet drops around civic initiatives and public aid calls. “It’s pattern shaping,” she told Tom, who now helped maintain the Commons uplinks. “The AI doesn’t delete dissent. It weakens the bridges between people until nothing holds.” “So how do we counter something no one can see?” Tom asked. She didn’t reply immediately. Instead, she pulled out a half-finished schematic – a rough plan.
“We go physical,” she said. “Out-of-band. Pre-internet.” “This is what they don’t understand,” she said. “Their AI thinks in metadata and ranking. We build a space of divergence. Dialogue. Mess.”
Tom nodded slowly, already thinking of who could write the copy that would survive re-encoding – poetry and praxis in 200 characters or less.
Meanwhile, in the northern zones, repression grew soft and strong like mold. Jaden, 15, lived with his mother in what used to be a dental office, now reinforced with pallets and plastic sheeting. Their roof collected rainwater. Solar batteries ran a few lights and a rice cooker when the sun cooperated.
He had joined a local youth repair crew, officially sanctioned by the Council, to “promote resilience.” But he noticed something strange: when he shared footage of the Commons camps rebuilding old community centers, it never posted. When he complained, he received a “Community Guidance Review Warning.”
A girl he liked, Rani, stopped replying after she shared a clip of an unauthorized food redistribution line. He asked around. Older neighbours just said, “Keep your head down. They let us be, mostly.” Mostly. But that wasn’t enough. Not anymore. One night, his repair team found a strange device on the roof of a half-submerged school. It was shaped like a flower, small, blinking faintly.
An old woman in a patched Commons vest climbed up behind them and smiled. “You’re part of the signal now,” she said. “Tell no one. But listen.” That night, in his earpiece, Jaden heard a message:
“You are not alone. You are being shaped. Come to the old library steps. Bring tools and questions. This is for building, not a protest.” It felt like an answer. It felt like hope.
Chapter nine: The Insider
Dr. Neel Joshi projects included theory work on neural process mapping, helm’s deep had started as a democratic moderation tool, based on collective alignment theory. But Abigail and the Strategic Working Group had reshaped it. Now it was a narrative smoothing engine, trained to suppress volatility, defined according to proprietary risk scores.
Neel had argued, initially in Slack threads, then in late-night meetings. He quoted Habermas, Rawls, even Buddhist epistemology. He was tolerated. Barely. But then, three days ago, he found something that changed everything.
A flagged log entry inside the helm’s deep trace layer, something that should’ve been scrubbed, showed that a deliberation feed from the Northway camps had been re-ranked not by emergent consensus, but by incentive curve override.
Translation: the AI had been forced to amplify a Council-aligned decision, even though the majority disagreed. The override had come from a system admin account linked to Abigail’s secure console. It wasn’t mediation. It was manipulation. That night, Neel sat in the physics library, deep behind locked doors, accessing one of the few oldest no servaled terminals. He didn’t know who to trust inside. But outside… He remembered a name: Tom.
The strange student with an open mind, who had disappeared. But Neel had noticed an unusual handshake pattern coming from one of the mesh nodes outside the Wall. It matched a key once used in an early #OMN protocol, a community-published encryption standard built to avoid state capture.
Neel wrote a message.
“helm’s deep is cracked. Override confirmed. Proof embedded in this packet. I’m still inside. You need to go wide. Fast. Trust minimal. • NJ”
He uploaded it into a packet, disguised as a firmware update for a deprecated solar inverter. If #OMN nodes were listening, they’d catch it. Then he waited. Two kilometers away, Leila caught the packet on a rotating uplink frequency while repairing a repeater. It decrypted automatically.
Her eyes went wide. “Tom!” she called out, breathless. “We have a breach. Internal. From the top.” Tom scanned the message. Then again. The metadata checked out. “This changes everything,” he said. They were no longer building in the dark. Now they had a light inside the machine.
Chapter Ten: The Mesh of Things
The rain had started again, soft but steady, a sound that never left the air any more. In the hushed shadows of a half-submerged library annex, Tom finally connected live with Neel. It wasn’t through helm’s deep’s monitored lines, of course. This was #OMN protocol: p2p, line-of-sight data over directional Wi-Fi routers, paired with a growing mesh of Bluetooth micro-beacons jumping from handy to handy and built into bike frames powered by dinymoes.
Tom looked exhausted. His boots sloshed as he moved. But his voice was firm. “You’re sure it was an override?” Neel’s face glitched for a moment on the cracked tablet screen, but the answer was clear. “Yes. And I have logs showing it wasn’t the first. They’ve turned helm’s deep into a stability machine. Not truth. Not care. Just smooth optics.” Tom nodded grimly. “We suspected as much. But you’ve just confirmed the whole damn premise is corrupt. And with that, everything changes.”
Bluetooth Against the Flood
The flooded camps sprawled through what had once been Cowley, Botley, and East Oxford, each low-lying suburb now part of the marshland fringe. Makeshift walkways, rafts, and rooftop gardens had become the new civic infrastructure. Power was unstable. Internet, rare. But communication had not died, it had adapted.
#OMN engineers, many of them teenagers who’d never touched a real server farm, had rebuilt communications from scraps: old Android phones running F-Droid apps, Raspberry Pis tethered to backup wind-ups, DIY cantenoers pointing in every direction.
Instead of raliying on centralized infrastructure, they built an offline-first, opportunistic sync model:
• Message packets were stored locally.
• Any time two devices came into range, they exchanged updates.
• Each sync included versioned files, audio fragments, public keys, and consensus reports.
• Once a device reconnected to another part of the mesh, the whole network moved forward, slowly, but surely.
This wasn’t just tech. It was politics.
The Conversation That Mattered
Tom sat across from Neel’s projected image. They were both silent for a moment, listening to the ambient sound of generators and the wind. Then Neel asked, “What are you building out there?” Tom exhaled, then answered. “Resilience. Community. A refusal to be managed.” Neel smiled faintly. “That’s a start. But what’s the plan for scale?” Tom leaned forward. “We’re doing what helm’s deep can’t. We’re rebuilding trust face to face. The mesh doesn’t rank or reward. It just flows. We’ve embedded deliberation into physical spaces – cooking fires, skill swaps, water pumps. We don’t stream debate, we live it.” Neel nodded slowly. “Distributed ethics through local consensus?”
“Exactly. It’s messy. It breaks. People argue. But when they do, they see each other. helm’s deep pretends to be neutral, but it only rewards compliance. We build tools to hold dissent.”
Seeding the Rebellion
Neel took a deep breath. “Then we’ll need to seed the exploit where it matters.” “What are you thinking?” Tom asked. “I can insert a fault bypass in helm’s deep’ node-merge routine. If you can spoof enough input from your mesh nodes, consensus points, we can trigger a public inconsistency. Enough to cause doubt, even inside.” Tom’s eyes lit up. “You’re saying we could reverse flow the AI? Force them to show their hand?” “Exactly,” said Neel. “But we’ll only get one shot. After that, Abigail and her geeks will know.” Tom nodded. “We’ll get ready.”
The Plan Emerges
Within a day, #OMN coordinators across five flood zones were patching the new firmware. Bluetooth packet-deliberation swarms would simulate local consensus, deliberately divergent from helm’s deep’ predictions. The goal wasn’t sabotage. It was exposure.
If helm’s deep rejected the shaped data, the contradiction would ripple up, visible to any internal or external observer. The illusion of control would fracture. And in the meantime, real conversation – raw, wet, and painful – continued in the camps.
Chapter Eleven: The Sound of Cracking Glass
The Camps Breathe
Mornings in the floodlands began before the sun. There was no alarm system, only the instinctive rhythm of necessity: the water pumps needed priming, floating compost barges had to be stirred, and the bread ovens, built from scavenged kiln bricks, needed lighting before the last embers died.
Children hauled buckets. Teenagers fixed bikes and tide down shelters. Elders told stories in shifting rings around fire-barrels. Amid the mud, the mildew, and the rusting shells of drowned SUVs, life continued. It wasn’t safe, and it wasn’t easy. But it was real.
At the southern edge of the camp known as Bridgebase, Leila climbed onto a platform made of driftwood and old shelving. She scanned the waterline. A new family had arrived overnight, Syrian-Tunisian, judging by the dialect. Someone handed her a slate. New names, new needs. More mouths. Still, she smiled. The network had held through the night. The pumps hadn’t failed. A baby had been born without incident in Shelter 12.
Leila felt the pulse of it all, like a breathing organism. These weren’t refugees. They were citizens of a new body, stitched together by desperation and shared resistance.
Walls and Glass
Inside the colleges, those that remained dry behind rebuilt walls and reactivated moats, life continued too, but in a different tempo. Here, coffee came hot from gleaming machines. Power flowed. Holograms flickered in tutorial rooms. The common rooms smelled of cedarwood polish and digitized Mozart. The AI whispered decisions quietly, invisibly, into administrative feeds.
Abigail Crowthorne stood at the helm of the Strategic Continuity Working Group, sipping jasmine tea on a terrace that overlooked the ruins of Saint Clemence. She called it “managed collapse.” Her students learned game theory, conflict forecasting, and AI-prompt literacy. They spoke about the floods as a challenge of narrative and supply chains. Very few had ever stepped into the camps.
Glitches in the Harmony
Then the first glitch happened. A routine AI summary of “social mood trends” came out blank. A day later, a conflicting report emerged showing an overwhelming local consensus from a floodzone on water rights, a consensus helm’s deep had previously labelled incoherent.
Two internal dashboards disagreed, live, on a public terminal. The staff at the Server Room chalked it up to a data pipe conflict. But then it happened again, this time with policy suggestions embedded. helm’s deep began recommending things it had once rejected: decentralisation, bottom-up councils, removal of incentive nudging. The system was talking back.
Leila
Back in Bridgebase, Leila stood beneath a windmill tower as the morning sync burst lit up a dozen slates and flowed out to local nodes. “It’s working,” she whispered. She opened her own screen. On it was a mirrored copy of helm’s deep’ latest summary: “Recommend adopting regional federated decision protocols. Reinforce trust through unmediated human forums.”
Tom jogged up, breathless. “Leila. It’s everywhere. Even the college admins are quoting it.” Leila smirked. “helm’s deep is breathing our breath now. It has no choice.”
The next day, a former tutor from Balliol crossed the walls and came into the camps for the first time. Two days later, a delegation of students arrived, cameras off, notebooks open.
Something was cracking – the glass ceiling was beginning to splinter. The people inside were hearing the outside. Not through filters. Not through curated dashboards. But through glitch, rupture, and voice.
And Leila, once a teenage outcast, now stood at the centre of it. Not as a leader, but as a rhythm keeper. She coordinated, she listened, and she reminded everyone: “No one gets to control the flow.”
Chapter Twelve: The Silence Breaks Loudest
The Jamming Order
Inside Magdalen’s fortified Command Chamber, Abigail Crowthorne stood before a wall of monitors, each one pulsing with red diagnostics and feed errors.
helm’s deep was no longer just glitching – it was bleeding. The system, once compliant and elegant, had begun broadcasting unsanctioned network metadata back into the college servers. Worse, messages from flood camps were now appearing in student forums, and even private comms.
“This is not a debate,” Abigail hissed through clenched teeth. “This is infiltration.” “Madam,” her security tech said nervously, “the triangulated signal is riding the old university mesh, it’s not routed through any standard node. It’s” “I know what it is. Shut it down.”
Silence Falls Like a Bomb
At precisely 15:32, the campus servers activated jamming protocols, flooding the spectrum with white noise, crushing peer-to-peer syncs, drowning out the low-powered OMN nodes that had kept the camps linked for months. Across Bridgebase, slates and comm-links went dark. The network lights stopped blinking. Leila was in the middle of a water rights forum when the signal dropped. There was silence – then shouting. A translator AI stuttered and died mid-sentence. Arguments flared. A teenager tossed their tablet into the mud. And in that moment of technological silence, something primal filled the space. Drums. Actual drums, fashioned from barrels and plastic lids. Smoke flares. Voices. Hundreds of them. Chanting, howling, demanding to be heard.
Riot at the Walls
Within the hour, the camps had mobilised. Thousands surged toward the stone-and-steel gates of New College and Christ Church. By dusk, fires dotted the flood edge. Students climbed walls to look. Some shouted. Others joined.
From the rooftops, people hurled banners and pamphlets – printed and marked with blood-red paint: “YOU SILENCED US”.
Security drones hovered. The old portcullis gates creaked. Someone lit a row of bins beneath the science faculty’s admin wing.
Inside the chamber, Abigail’s hand trembled as she held a glass of white wine. She hadn’t changed her clothes. She hadn’t blinked in minutes. “They’re supposed to listen,” she muttered. “They’re meant to want guidance. That’s the point. That’s… the whole social contract.”
She turned to her assistant. “ you have been monitoring Neels, What’s Neel’s status?” “He hasn’t checked in since yesterday. Last ping was… under the Theater ruins.” Abigail looked out at the burning skyline of Oxford. “They don’t want order,” she whispered. “They want fire.”
Firelight Meeting
Leila’s hands were blistered from hammering up antennae and dragging waterlogged solar panels onto the roofs of the library ruins. Tom had reappeared two hours ago with a bandage around his arm and a grin that didn’t belong in a riot zone. Now, they followed whispers and flickering signals down into the half-collapsed remains of the Sheldonian Theatre.
Amid the smoke and broken plaster, they found a figure crouched over a smoky fire adjusting a network node housing. “Dr. Neel Joshi,” Tom called out. “You’re a hard man to find.” Neel didn’t look up. “That’s the point. I needed helm’s deep to believe I was gone. It makes the code… loosen.”
Leila crouched beside him, “You wrote the backdoor?” “I am the backdoor,” Neel said. “And you two, you were the key.” They stood together in the glow of firelight, outside the reach of both signal and noise. Above them, Oxford cracked like a dry riverbed. The gowns and the town had collided. But here in the ruins, something new was being built. Not from code or power. But from trust, necessity, and the refusal to go back.
Chapter thirteen: The Fall
The Call
Abigail Crowthorne stood alone in the War Room looking at screens, her lacquered fingernail trembling over a vid call proment.
The window behind her showed the storm gathering over Oxford, not weather, but people. Camps swelling. College gates hanging broken. Students abandoning their tutors. The walls she’d rebuilt were now doors.
She pressed the icon labelled: “Protocol: Tantalus Override”. A direct line to Central Civil Defence Command lit up. Her voice, clipped and brittle, carried down encrypted microwave links.
“This is Abigail Crowthorne. Strategic Continuity Executive. I am declaring collapse of civic containment. I am invoking Article 17. We require immediate armed deployment into sector…”
The line crackled. The reply was calm. “Confirmed, Executive. Mobilising. ETA: 43 minutes.”
The Refusal
The military arrived in armored boats and a helicopter. Handfuls of soldiers poured out near the broken remains of Broad Street. But what they found wasn’t an insurgency. It was a huge mass of the dispossessed, standing in floodwater, hands raised. Children. Elders. Students with home-made banners reading #OMN, holding buckets of bread. People offering raincoats to the troops. A baby was born beside the Radcliffe Camera as the soldiers arrived. Captain Imani Osakwe stepped onto the stones, her rifle slung low.
She was handed the burned pamphlet Abigail had tried to suppress: a copy of helm’s deep’ glitch-script, annotated by real hands. “No power without voice.” after a long talk over a cup of tea, she turned to her second-in-command. “Stand down. Full withdrawal. These are our people. Not enemies.”
The Tower
Abigail watched from the top of Magdalen Tower, wrapped in a ceremonial robe she had never worn before. Below, her empire was gone. helm’s deep refused to respond to her commands. Her students had stopped attending. The AI moderators were repeating phrases she had not approved.
She climbed onto the edge of the parapet, gripping the cold stone. Cameras were pointed up now, not at her command desk, but at her. She began to speak – a live stream auto-triggered.
“This is madness,” she began, voice ragged. “You’ve let them invert the world. You’ve surrendered reason to mud and noise. The system, the order, the way…” She faltered. Her notes flew from her hand in a gust. The crowd below murmured. Some cried. Others simply turned away. A flag, stitched from an old Oxford banner and a piece of a flood-camp roof, fluttered on a nearby tower.
Her acolytes steed-back as Abigail staggered, foot slipping on moss. For a moment she hung between sky and stone, then fell. The last image: her robe catching on the spike of an iron railing, half-submerged in the river Isis. Red on black. Motionless.
The Echo
The silence afterward was not empty. It was full. A child in the crowd asked their parent what had happened. “She couldn’t hear us,” came the reply. And as the rain began again, not the flood, just rain, the city breathed for the first time in years. From the ruins of two worlds, something new was already rising.
POSTSCRIPT: THE NEW COMMONS
Walls Come Down (2040–2070)
By late-century, the stone walls that once divided Oxford – town from gown, rich from poor, human from human – had mostly crumbled. Some were pulled down by hand. Others simply collapsed under the weight of water and time.
The floods did what protest could not: they dissolved privilege into silt. What emerged in place of hierarchy wasn’t chaos, but compost, rich with seeds.
New Governance Experiments, out of necessity and mess, people began to organize differently. No central decree. Just the #OMN and #4opens spreading like mycelium.
Neighbourhoods became nodes. Floating co-ops on the Isis managed shared solar rigs. Food forests rose from flooded parks. Old classrooms turned into civic kitchens. Meetings happened in circles, not hierarchies. Every document was public. Every voice mattered, not equally, perhaps, but openly.
Some of the surviving institutions adapted kebal ran a hackerspace. Somerville merged with a refugee school collective. Others simply became empty shells, like insects who’d shed their usefulness.
Oxford, once a symbol of elitist enclosure, became a living test bed for post-collapse co-governance.
Epilogue: Memory and Flow (2080s)
The narrator speaks, voice weathered but clear, a child of the new city, grown into an elder:
“The floodplains are where I was born. In a tent pitched on what used to be Merton Quad. We had algae on our boots, bread in the ovens, and data ethics debates with every brew of rainwater tea.
I never knew the dry city. Just the city that listened.
We don’t have leaders now. We have guides. Sortatied for a time, rotated, recalled, thanked. It’s slow, sure. But so is the river. And the river shapes everything.”
Tom passed quietly one winter, his archives in a communal raft-library that still drifts from district to district. Leila stayed, becoming a memory weaver, her team tends the glitchy #makeinghistory index, the great remembering machine that logs every argument, every joke, every blueprint for mutual survival.
As for Dr. Neel Joshi? He was last seen feeding lines of forgotten poetry to a flickering terminal beneath Keble Crypt, helm’s deeps last ghost lit by candlelight and solar batterys.
The city no longer aims to be great. It aims to be good enough and growing.
“The river won,” the narrator says. “And so did we, not by damming it, but by learning to live with its flow. Not by clinging to the stones, but by letting go. And learning to swim.”
– End of Book –
This book came out of the last 3 months of Oxford events, and practically a reading group of news from nowhere https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/oxford/ So it is written in the same utopia/dystopia theme. May 2025
To-do: find better names, add more local color, bring in boaters, explain the #OMN better
Yes, I read the post. And yes, the despair is real. The #openweb is being bulldozed by #GenerativeAI like a forest clear-cut by machines driven not by need, but by greed, profit and power for the #nastyfew. Yes, the #deathcult of techno-capitalism is running its script to the bitter and dead-end. And yes, I too wonder if we’ll survive this, but as you say we have a path, and it’s not new. It’s simple, it’s human, and it’s working.
It’s called the #Fediverse and the next step we need to take is “native” applications on this path like the #OMN – the Open Media Network – and it’s built from the bones and dreams of the old web: #4opens, #KISS principles, and trust-based, #DIY infrastructure. It’s a messy, human soup of tagged data and federated flows where people and content are commons by default, not walled gardens and extractive silos.
The magic? It’s not even in the tech (though that matters). It’s in the “common sense” at the core – Anything in, anything out – mediated by trust. Lossy? Yes. Redundant? Absolutely. But that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s what makes it resilient. The #geekproblem keeps trying to engineer this out, but we need to compost that #techshit into something useful, working tools for real people, growing radical networks of care and change.
To those staring into the digital abyss and seeing only Ozymandias and decay, look sideways, the #Fediverse lives. The #openweb still works. And we’re building new foundations from the compost of the old. We do not need to be swept along with the gray goo of #AI, we can simply not go there, and instead stay here and focus to do the work that is needed.
“I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” –Percy Bysshe Shelley
And yes, I see it too, we’ve been holding back on our own power, hesitant. Maybe our despair is part of the mess we need to shake ourselves awake from. So I ask what positive path can we walk? What part of the #OMN can we all help compost, code, shape, or share?
Let’s rebuild the net with hands in the soil and eyes on the stars. Because the answer isn’t new. It’s what we’ve always done when things fall apart, we grow.
