From personal mess to shared paths, #OMN in the post-truth world

Consensus matters – but it’s so hard – collective projects, media, activism and infrastructure require a minimum level of agreement about what the problem is. Not total agreement, but enough shared reality to coordinate sustainable action. Without some form of shared external social truth, progressive projects do not move at all, this is not always because people are malicious, but more often because they are no longer standing on any shared ground. This mess, is a problem, as it means needed paths keep being blocked.

We are living in a post-truth world, but that phrase hides the real problem. The deeper issue is that too meany people are fighting private battles inside their own heads – about identity, status, belonging, fear, and control – and then projecting those battles onto the social world around them. These internal conflicts are treated as universal truths, so when challenged, they harden rather than soften, this is the mess we need to compost. This is why so many conversations that should lead to collective action instead collapse into friction, blinded misunderstanding, and burnout.

In the absence of this, every proposal becomes personal: Critique feels like attack, needed structure feels like control, boundaries feel like exclusion. The result is paralysis disguised as debate, it is not accidental, it is the #dotcons cultural outcome of decades of individualisation, platform capitalism, and algorithmic amplification of conflict. This created mess blocks any progress, including an inability to talk clearly about why existing systems fail, what we have to put up with is constant triggering of defensiveness and rejection.

Two recurring patterns surface here, the “geek problem”: an over-focus on tools, optimisation, and abstract purity, detached from any useful lived social reality. The “fashionista problem”: an over-focus on language, image, and alignment with dominant narratives, avoiding any useful structural conflict. The problem is that if you don’t see these patterns, the current media ecosystem mess looks “natural” and inevitable. If you do see them, the need for something like #OMN becomes much more obvious, thus the hashtag story as a tool some people might understand this path

Why this keeps turning into conflict, it is not really about tone, vocabulary, or even definitions. It is about where responsibility sits, some people want problems softened so they feel welcoming. Others insist problems must be named clearly, or they cannot be solved. Both impulses sometimes come from good places. But when clarity is treated as hostility, and comfort is treated as progress, nothing moves. People disengage, energy drains away, the needed projects stall.

This is all mixed up in a Chicken-and-Egg trap. Outreach is hard because #OMN deliberately refuses to do certain things: It avoids central control, it avoids “common sense” corporate mediation, it avoids vague and easy “platform” path promises. This makes it difficult to write promotional text without either: Over-promising things that don’t exist, or explaining constraints that sound negative without context. To try and compost this chicken-and-egg problem, we need shared understanding to communicate simply, but we need communication to build shared understanding. Can you see the mess from this?

We use hashtags as scaffolding for the needed social truth, not as slogans, but as scaffolding, lightweight markers that point to recurring structural issues: #geekproblem #fashernista #dotcons #blocking are not insults. They are shorthand for patterns that otherwise take pages to explain. But, without shared context, they are still easily misread as personal attacks. Again we face #blocking.

So what can actually help? If #OMN is to happen, we need to change how we resolve these moments of friction. Collective projects do not grow by consensus with everyone, so we need to build shared language gradually, not defensively, social truth is cultivated, not imposed. A first step is #KISS stop treating discomfort as failure, discomfort is often the signal that something real is being touched.

The hard truth, is that no one is obliged to participate, nobody has to do anything. But collective alternatives do not appear by magic. They are built by people willing to sit with tension long enough to let something shared emerge. OMN is an attempt to do that, to move from affinity groups from isolated personal wars toward media commons where cooperation is once again possible.

The #blocking is real, but so is the way through it, if we stop mistaking friction for hostility, and clarity for aggression. The work is not to be nicer, it is to be collective again.

Mainstreaming: Piracy is a symptom, not a crime

From a #mainstreaming point of view, what people call “piracy” is not a simple moral failure, it’s rather a signal of systemic #dotcons failure. Again and again, across decades, people have shown a simple truth: When access is fair, affordable, and humane, people pay. When systems become extractive, people route around them.

This is not new, not edgy, it’s basic social behaviour. Before the Internet: we had Informal commons, cassette copying, vinyl bootlegs, tape trading networks, these were not experienced as “theft” by the people who did this – they were social distribution systems, low-scale, trust-based, culturally embedded, limited by friction. They existed alongside markets, artists still toured, labels still made money, culture still flowed.

This was a pre-digital common, tolerated because it couldn’t scale enough to threaten capital. Then came the first native digital implementation. Napster originally wasn’t thought of as a crime, but was turned into a real fork in the road when Napster didn’t invent piracy, it simply removed friction and exposed the contradiction.

Napster was an early, messy, accidental example of what open distribution could have become if shaped by public-interest values rather than VC mess. What panicked the industry wasn’t copying – it was loss of control. Two paths were possible:

Adapt to abundance, treat sharing as promotion, build fair access + fair reward, except that copying is native to digital culture.

Reassert artificial scarcity, lawfare, DRM, surveillance, platform capture.

They chose the second, before they shift to the working subscription “solution” This turned into a temporary truce in the that #dotcons streaming worked, briefly, because it aligned with human behaviour: convenience, simplicity, predictable cost, “good enough” access. This reduced piracy, not because people became more ethical, but because the service stopped being so hostile. This is crucial, piracy goes down when #mainstreaming systems respect users.

Though this did not last, the pushing of the #dotcons (#enshittification) broke the social contract, now we’re seeing a piracy resurgence – due to legitimacy collapse. Platforms: fragmented access, raised prices, removed ownership, revoked sharing, erased archives and locked culture behind licences. The normal mess that you don’t own culture any more, you rent permission until it’s revoked.

People don’t won’t this enclosure of culture and memory “if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing” isn’t only edgy internet logic, it’s a commons’ logic. It says: ownership has been broken, legitimacy has been lost, people are reclaiming agency informally. This is exactly how commons historically re-emerge, outside broken institutions, not through them. So from any seasonable mainstreaming view, Piracy Isn’t Anti-Artist – It’s Anti-Bullshit, a service problem, it’s what happens when distribution is controlled instead of shared.

Where #OMN fits, the Open Media Network is not about simply justifying piracy. It’s about removing the need for it by rebuilding: public-first distribution, shared infrastructure, local publishing, federated archives, cultural memory that can’t be revoked, trust instead of DRM, access without enclosure, communing.

Culture needs to be: easy to access, hard to erase, socially rooted, economically plural, governed in the open. When those conditions exist, piracy fades into the background, not because people are policed, but because the system stops being abusive.

Piracy Is the smoke – enclosure Is the fire – the historical arc looks like this:

informal sharing → tolerated

digital abundance → panic

platform compromise → temporary calm

enclosure + extraction → rebellion

From this view, people aren’t becoming criminals, they’re disobedient consumers because consumption has become hostile. What people need to see in this mess is that Piracy isn’t the future, it’s a warning flare. The future is rebuilding open, shared, accountable media infrastructure so that: artists are supported, culture persists, access is normal, and people don’t have to choose between legality and dignity. That’s not nostalgia, it’s the unfinished business from the original #openweb.

And yes, it needs to happen #OMN

We need to stop worshipping a #deathcult

A path to do this is to step away from the #mainstreming mess. In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. The prize recognised their work on how institutions shape prosperity, most famously through their book Why Nations Fail. The timing matters, it matters a lot.

This award lands at exactly the moment we should be asking why Institutional Economics – the respectable face of #mainstreaming – has spent the last fifteen years pushing us to keep kneeling at the altar of the #deathcult of #neoliberalism.

For more than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis – a crisis that should have finished neoliberal economics for good – our liberal institutions quietly stepped in to rescue the doctrine. Not by defending it openly, but by reframing its failures. This wasn’t accidental. It’s central to the mess we’re living in now.

The 2008 crash began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and rapidly spread from finance into the real economy. It triggered the largest global contraction since World War II. Advanced economies saw GDP falls of over 10%. In the US alone, more than $16 trillion in household wealth vanished.

The shock was so extreme that Queen Elizabeth II famously asked economists at the London School of Economics why nobody had seen it coming, the profession replied that it was a “failure of the collective imagination”. That answer was revealing and evasive. Because imagination hadn’t been lacking before the crash. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, #neoliberalism dominated economics. Its core beliefs were simple, absolute, and aggressively enforced:

Markets are efficient

Deregulation increases productivity

Financial innovation reduces risk

Macroeconomic instability has been solved

These ideas were institutionalised across universities, central banks, and international organisations. Nobel Prizes were handed out to models built on perfectly rational actors and self-correcting markets. Central bankers talked confidently about a “Great Moderation”: stable inflation, steady growth, forever.

Economics became “scientific”, self-referential, and closed to challenge. This wasn’t wisdom, it was a pile of shit built on mathematical abstraction – a classic #geekproblem – detached from lived social reality. Financial fantasies were celebrated. Subprime mortgages were reframed as inclusion. Mortgage-backed securities were said to spread risk. Collateralised debt obligations were hailed as marvels of modern finance.

They were, in reality, weapons of mass financial destruction. The #deathcult was warming up. When the system collapsed, neoliberal economics should have been held to account. No theory in modern history had failed so completely, so quickly, with such devastating consequences. Instead, it reinvented itself.

The first move was redefinition. Under the Obama administration, the US abandoned laissez-faire dogma overnight. Banks were declared “systemically important”. Corporations were bailed out. Trillions were injected into markets through quantitative easing. Socialism for the rich was revealed as normal.

This should have been the moment it became obvious that #neoliberalism was never about principles. It was always about power. Markets, models, and theories were tools – not truths – used to maintain capital’s dominance over society. But what we got was the normal mess of denial, spin, and fragmentation.

Once stability returned, denial followed. Economists claimed victory. The crisis was blamed on interest rates, oil prices, China’s savings – anything except the theory itself. The line became: “The models failed to predict the crisis, but the solutions worked.” That sleight of hand kept neoliberalism alive.

Instead of lifting our heads and walking away, we fell for the smoke and mirrors. The priesthood fragmented neoliberalism into subfields, and our #fashionista classes filled the space. Game theory analysed distressed financial institutions without asking why they were distressed.
Behavioural economics blamed low-income borrowers’ “biases” while ignoring policies that made housing unaffordable. Feminist economics debated unpaid labour while leaving capital accumulation untouched.

Each critique was partial. Each acted as a distraction. None threatened the altar we were still collectively worshipping. The strongest shield, however, came from Institutional Economics – the respectable centre of #mainstreaming liberal thought.

Why, Why Nations Fail succeeds, it “common sense” argues that prosperity comes from “inclusive institutions” – markets, property rights, patents – supported by political institutions like democracy and the rule of law. “Extractive institutions”, we’re told, lead to stagnation.

This framework was easy to accept in the common-sense fog of the #fashionista class. It sounded critical while leaving capitalism intact. Weak, procedural democracy was sold as the mechanism that could tame markets.

What it ignored – completely – is that democracy inside highly unequal societies is easily captured by capital. Elections reproduce power relations far more often than they correct them. By declaring any market outcome produced through elections legitimate, the #nastyfew who this mess served grabbed and twisted “democratic” approval.

At a moment of global instability – Eurozone debt crises, austerity, mass unemployment – #mainstreaming economics offered a comforting story: the problem wasn’t capitalism, just “bad institutions”.

The reality on the ground, in Europe, austerity devastated entire societies. Greece lost over a quarter of its GDP. Youth unemployment passed 50%. Public assets were stripped. Debt increased. Today, a six-day work week is framed as “responsibility”.

In the United States, recovery was brutally unequal. Between 2009 and 2019, the top 1% captured 40% of all income growth. Asset prices exploded while wages stagnated. Private equity gutted industries. In the world of the #dotcons, gig work replaced stability. Neoliberalism didn’t retreat. It consolidated.

There was, however, a different path. China – worshipping a different cult – ignored neoliberal assumptions after 2008. Instead of monetary inflation, it pursued fiscal stimulus, infrastructure investment, R&D, and industrial policy. Growth remained high. Manufacturing expanded. Living standards improved. China became the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity more than a decade ago.

Western institutions urged “liberalisation”, framed through #mainstreaming economics. Political reform was demanded – meaning access for Western capital. China refused. When China’s property bubble burst in 2021, contagion was contained. Capital was redirected into technology and manufacturing. Industrial dominance accelerated.

This success could not be acknowledged, so institutional economics reframed it as “extractive”, unsustainable, and destined to collapse. Yet the facts contradict the story. Inequality is far higher in the US. China’s overproduction lowers global prices and stabilises living standards. Without it, global inequality would already be politically explosive.

So why are we still stuck, #Neoliberalism survives not because it works, but because it controls the story of what is possible. It offers legitimacy without transformation, democracy without redistribution, reform without power shifts.

Worse, over the last forty years it has reshaped education, work, identity, and the value of human life itself. It trained people to see themselves as assets, competitors, and risks. It normalised insecurity and abstraction. That’s why we’re facing collapse now: a system that has exhausted its social, ecological, and moral foundations.

Yes, it’s a mess, you probably need a shovel #OMN

We need to be disturbed

Open Media Network, a path we forgot

The #OMN is not trying to invent the future, it’s trying to restart a social path people forgot they had. That path was never clean, it never asked permission, it never felt safe. But it was real, and that’s the only soil movements have ever grown in.

Why this has to happen now? Because the ground we’re standing on is collapsing. The #dotcons are rotting – hollowed out into surveillance, manipulation, and rent extraction. Journalism has collapsed into PR cycles, outrage farming, and access journalism. Activism is trapped in performative loops that generate visibility but not power.

#climatechaos doesn’t wait for governance frameworks, steering committees, or another round of funding calls. And more bluntly: the knowledge is dying with the people who lived it. If this knowledge isn’t re-embedded in practice now, it doesn’t get “preserved”. It becomes an archive, not a lineage. Archives don’t fight back, lineages do.

Why everything feels so hard? The feeling of complexity isn’t because the work is impossible. It exists because people are traumatised by collapse, capture, and betrayal. Projects were taken over, movements were professionalised, trust was burned and replaced with process. You don’t argue people out of that, you outgrow it by example. Working systems dissolve fear faster than any explanation ever could.

This will never be mainstream – stop wanting it to be, accept this early and everything gets easier. The goal is not millions of users. The goal is hundreds of nodes that matter. If it works, it spreads sideways: by imitation, by reuse, by adaptation, that’s how #Indymedia spread, that’s how it will happen again – if it’s allowed to stay messy. #Mainstreaming is how movements die politely.

Reboot action media, not commentary, this is where most #Fediverse projects go wrong. #Indymedia worked because: it covered what people were doing, it was embedded in movements, it was operational, not opinion-driven – Action reports. Situation updates. Logistics. Reflection after action. Signal is useful under pressure. Noise is everything else.

Make mediation visible again – #Blocking culture killed community memory, bring back: named metaphors, public-but-careful conflict summaries, rollback instead of deletion, context instead of erasure. This does not mean tolerating abuse, it means treating conflict as social material, not contamination. Movements grow by composting tension, not pretending it isn’t there.

Cultural infrastructure, not nostalgia. Plumbing, not a platform. The #OMN is not: a solution, a network to “join”, a replacement for anything. It is: pipes, flows, tools for people already doing work. Examples:

“You’re documenting housing struggles? Here’s a way to syndicate without selling your soul.”

“You’re organising climate actions? Here’s a way to publish without an algorithm.”

“You’re running a local media collective? Here’s a way to connect without central control.”

People don’t trust platforms, they trust tools that work.

The reboot principle is affinity before scale. Action before legitimacy. Use before platform. This is how #Indymedia worked before it forgot itself. A practical path to rebooting a community of action. Start with a small, visible “We”. Not an open call, not a mailing list, a named affinity cluster of people with shared history and aligned instincts, 5–15 people, is ideal. People who ship things, who argue honestly, who don’t need brand permission to act. This group is not representative, it’s responsible. Their job is not to speak for anyone, it’s to do visible work others can plug into.

Final note. This isn’t about being radical for style points, it’s about being adequate to the moment. The tools already exist, the knowledge already exists, the need is obvious. What’s missing is the courage to stop waiting for permission and start rebuilding the paths that once carried real power.

That’s what the #OMN is for.

Safety-absolutism is quietly killing change and challenge

The American hard right is not a movement – It’s a mess

Meany people lazily see “the Right” in America as a unified political movement, but this is simplistic, comforting fiction. People still see as “normal” what we used to have, an orthodox worship of a #deathcult. But this is tired path is now being overwhelmed by a hard right (populist) rejection, and to add to this mess, this reaction is it itself is captured by meany personal grabs for power and statues, yes it truly is a mess.

We need to look at this, it matters, because treating the Right as a monolith is not only lazy analysis – it’s politically disabling. You can’t challenge what you don’t understand, and you can’t build alternatives if you mistake coalitions for any clear ideologies. Let’s look at the hard right shift as a wider picture, there are meany factions with strong opinions, incompatible paths, and occasional fistfights, all forced to share one centralised path.

So let’s break the myths. On the current hard right, the #GOP Is no longer a party – it’s a reactionary mess. America’s winner-take-all electoral system forces narrowly different ideologies into just two viable parties. With the end of the post-war cross-party worship, this means seeding coalitions, without any coherence.

The Republican Party is not one belief system. It is a structural compromise between factions that actively hate each other, held together by access to power, donor money, media ecosystems and, increasingly, one man’s delusional personality. Let’s draft 4 of these original Republican tribes, who existed long before Trump arrived, the old #GOP.

Faith & Flag Conservatives

These are your Bible-first, America-second, Bible-third conservatives. They are blindly religious (mostly white evangelicals), hardline on abortion, LGBTQ rights, and “traditional values”, comfortable with militarism when framed as spiritual warfare and intensely pro-Trump, despite his… everything. If this faction were a brand, the slogan would be: “God Bless America – and Also, Just God. Mostly God.”

Populist Right

These are the “working-class guys yelling about globalists” conservatives. Who are fiercely anti-immigration, deeply anti-elite (except their elitists), surprisingly open to taxing the rich and regulating corporations, adjacent to conspiracy culture, even when they deny it. Their core contradiction is incoherence, they demand the return of factory jobs… while shouting about it on TikTok, filmed on an iPhone, manufactured in Shenzhen.

Committed Conservatives

These are the pre-Trump Republicans who survived the Trump madness turn. They are the original priests of the #deathcult: Pro-business, pro-free trade, anti-regulation, hawkish on foreign policy, Their loyalty is to tax cuts above all human needs. This is the GOP of donors, boardrooms, and polite dinner parties. The old power politics, before grievance, became the primary organising principle of the party.

The Ambivalent Right

These are the “I’m conservative, but not like… that” crowd. They tend to be younger, economically conservative, socially more moderate, Trump-curious but not Trump-devotional. They listen to Jordan Peterson, think universal healthcare “sounds chill,” have a gay friend. Think old school yuppie who don’t want to be left-wing. So they drift.

Then Trump arrived in the this establishment temple and overturned the altar. As we can see he didn’t create these factions, he used them, rearranged them, amplified some, sidelined others, and glued the whole mess together with charisma, grievance, and constant conflict.

From this mess grew the current more fascist path:

#MAGA Populists, the dominant force, who are aggressively anti-immigration, obsessed with tariffs, convinced the system is rigged, immersed in right-wing media, personally loyal to Trump, not policies. Their political theory is simple and old school: “Build the wall, raise the tariffs, and arrest somebody.”

Traditional republicans, Country Club crew who hate tariffs, love tax cuts, want cheap immigrant labour (quietly), prefer predictable imperialism to Trump’s mess. They have donor money, which is why they still exist – despite being constantly bullied by MAGA influencers.

Small-Government Conservatives / Fiscal Hawks are the old priests of the #deathcult. Libertarian wonks who obsess over deficits, hate government spending (unless it’s police or military), are split between isolationism and aggressive war fantasies, believe every problem can be solved by cutting one more department. They’ve been angry about taxes since birth and plan to die that way.
Religious Right who politically weaponised churches. They on the up, got Roe overturned, want a national abortion ban, believe God has a detailed policy platform. Trump frustrates them because he’s useful, not righteous.

The latecomers, the #Techbro billionaires, who shifted from the centre right of the Democrats to the Trump overnight. This happened as the government started sniffing about braking up their #dotcons empires. They want zero regulation, treat “free speech” as algorithmic advantage, oppose immigration except for high-skill visas, increasingly believe AI they control should replace democracy. Are fetishising fascism. This is not a mass movement – just billionaires and their fanboys discovering culture war leverage.

MAHA + Newly Converted Democrats – Make America Healthy Again – Wellness culture meets conspiracy nut jobs. They “care” about: Food chemicals, vaccines, chronic illness and “Medical freedom.” They arrived via RFK and pandemic brain damage. They’re not permanent Republicans – they’re politically unmoored and emotionally primed.

This coalition Is always fighting because they fundamentally disagree on almost everything: Tariffs: MAGA loves them, donors hate them. Immigration: Business wants workers, MAGA wants deportations. Abortion: Religious Right wants bans, Trump wants what ever keeps him in office and out of jail. Foreign policy: Hawks want wars, MAGA wants spectacle. AI: Tech Right wants no rules, voters are terrified. The is no ideological unity, it’s a messianic conflict, held together by personality and lust for power. As should be clear, the right mess is no monolith, and it has meany questionable expiration dates.

To have any hope of composting this mess, we need to understand factions not with empathy, but as, openings for change and challenge, it’s about moving past contradictions, and fault lines. Let’s not pretend otherwise, we need to not keep losing to this kinda mess which, currently, ignores us and keeps working no matter how bad it gets because it understands fragmentation very well – and works to exploit it ruthlessly.

Where is the progressive left? We need to do better #KISS

We fucked up… and that matters because we still have agency

We fucked up… and that matters because we still have agency

Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth: we fucked up the last 20 years of #openweb tech. Not “they” fucked it up. Not only #BigTech, not only venture capital, not only governments and surveillance states. We did, especially those of us who were closest to the tools, the protocols, the decisions – the geeks, developers, architects, and maintainers who shaped how this stuff actually worked in practice.

That matters, because it means we still have direct power over what happens next. Too often, external forces are used as an excuse. “Capital captured everything.” “Users don’t care.” “The network effects are too strong.” These stories become a form of #blocking – a way to avoid the harder work of change and challenge that is still possible inside our own communities.

The #geekproblem role in the #techmess is one of the hardest things to admit, that much of the current #techmess wasn’t imposed on us – it was designed by us. We built systems that privileged scale over care, efficiency over use, protocol purity over social process. We treated governance as a technical problem and social mess as something to be engineered away. We told ourselves that decentralisation alone would save us, while quietly centralising power in code repos, foundation boards, and informal hierarchies.

This is the #geekproblem in action: the blindness to social value, to lived use, to human mediation. The result is vast piles of #techshit – technically impressive, socially hollow systems that decay quickly because nobody actually owns them in a meaningful way.

And when these systems fail, the blame gets pushed outward. “The market did this.” “Users misused it.” “NGOs ruined it.” Sometimes those things are true – but they are never the whole story.

Then we have the # fashionistas default worship of the #deathcult which is the part people really don’t like hearing: most of us default-worship the #deathcult. #Neoliberalism doesn’t need true believers to function. It survives perfectly well on habit, convenience, careerism, and fear. We reproduce it every time we copy the UX patterns of the #dotcons, every time we design for engagement instead of meaning, every time we prioritise respectability over rupture.

At this point, polite critique is not enough. The climate is collapsing. Social trust is eroded. Institutions are hollowed out facades. We do not have the luxury of endless moderation and tone-policing.

Let’s be clear, it is well past time to hold active worshippers of the #deathcult in contempt – not as individuals to be cancelled, but as ideas and practices to be openly rejected. And more importantly, to challenge our own default compliance with those values.

Time is the one thing we don’t have. Yes, this shift will happen. Over the last few years, more people have abandon #dotcons, more will rediscover collective tools, more will rebuild local, horizontal networks.

The #OMN is precisely about that internal power: what we do together, how we organise, how we build, and crucially, what we refuse to reproduce. But here’s the problem #climatechaos does not wait for cultural maturation. Ecological breakdown, authoritarian drift, and economic precarity are accelerating now. If the #openweb is going to matter, it has to matter in this decade – not as a promise, but as lived infrastructure.

That means pushing change and challenge now, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it breaks consensus, even when it costs status. We cannot keep living inside copies of the #dotcons is one of the clearest failures of the last 10 years is this: we kept rebuilding copies of corporate platforms and calling them alternatives. The same feeds. Same metrics. Same influencer dynamics. Same UX assumptions. Just with better politics in the bio. That will never be enough.

For projects like #OMN to become real, we need to invest serious resources and energy into good #UX for #openweb projects – not slickness, not branding, but clarity, legibility, and human-scale control. Interfaces that normal people can understand. Systems that work in mess. Tools that support mediation instead of suppression. This is not about perfection. It’s about use-value over #blocking.

The next step is obvious and unavoidable, it’s not more think pieces, more foundations, more grant cycles. It’s rebuilding social-technical systems that people can actually use together, under pressure, without surrendering control. We already know this. Deep down, everyone reading this does.

The question is whether we act on it – or whether we keep hiding behind inevitability while the world burns. The #OMN is not a guarantee. It’s a refusal: to keep worshipping the #deathcult,
to keep copying the #dotcons, to keep pretending we have more time than we do.

The work is here. The tools are here. What’s missing is the will to stop fucking around.

Human tech – OMN

What are you doing today that is not pointless? Not a rhetorical question, a line in the sand. As too much contemporary “activism” is still busywork inside the #dotcons – visible, branded, career-friendly, and structurally harmless. Our old activist circles took the healthy internal tensions that once kept projects like #indymedia honest and fed them upward into a #fashernista vampire class: NGOs, foundations, panels, consultancies. For twenty years, they’ve drained grassroots energy to build CVs and gain access to “power”. That’s not radical, it’s capture.

Now, if we are serious about surviving #climatechaos and confronting the #deathcult, we have to stop doing pointless #techshit and start rebuilding outside the platforms that profit from our failure.

We need projects that doesn’t need permission, we need a #DIY crew. That means gathering like-minded people off the #dotcons, working collectively, not performatively, building small, useful things that actually publish, connect, and persist, following the #4opens: open process, open governance, open code, open data to accept mess, conflict, and compost as signs of life

The Open Media Network (#OMN) is not a brand or career ladder, not a #NGO pitch deck.
It’s unfinished work from the original #openweb – work that was paused, captured, and now needs rebooting.

So again, plainly – What are you doing today that is not pointless? If the answer is “posting”, “networking”, or “waiting for funding”, that’s a bad answer. If the answer is building with others, publishing outside capture, sharing control, doing the unglamorous work, welcome back.

#indymediaback #OMN #4opens #makeinghistory #OGB

Theological thinking disguised as economics

In the traditional media and our social reflection of this – “Belief in markets”, is theological thinking disguised as economics. The market is a god, and economists its priesthood. Modern economic discourse treats “the Market” as: omniscient (“the market knows best”), omnipotent (“there is no alternative”), morally authoritative (“price signals reveal truth”), beyond democratic challenge (“don’t interfere, or you’ll anger it”)

It should be easy to understand this isn’t analysis, it’s faith. When something goes wrong, the response isn’t accountability, it’s ritual: austerity, deregulation, labour discipline, “tightening belts”. This working class suffering becomes a necessary sacrifice to restore god’s favor. That’s why at the #OMN we called it the #deathcult – normal people are expected to suffer and die, quietly, so the economic system can live.

Priests, temples, and worshippers, religions have hierarchy, in this mainstream one: Central bankers are high priests, rating agencies are oracles, think tanks are seminaries, media pundits are evangelists, platforms are temples, metrics are scripture. It’s all theological thinking all the way down, surface disguised as economics

The closer you are to god (capital, liquidity, investment flows), the more authority you’re granted. Those far away – workers, communities, the climate – are treated as abstractions, “externalities”. And, like all priesthoods, our elitists claim neutrality while enforcing doctrine.

Heresy is not allowed, questioning the market is treated at best as: naive, dangerous, emotional, “anti-growth”, “anti-business”, “unrealistic”. This mirrors religious heresy exactly. Then we have the last 40 years of #posttruth, once belief replaces evidence, language becomes performative, words are used to signal loyalty, not to describe reality.

This matters for the #openweb and #OMN as the current path, the #dotcons are the digital expression of this religion, encoding market theology into infrastructure with engagement replaces meaning, growth replaces health, metrics replace judgment, extraction replaces relationship. This is why reform inside platforms fails, you’re not tweaking a tool, you’re challenging a faith system.

The #openweb threatens this religion because it decentralises authority, reintroduces human judgment, values trust over metrics, treats technology as means, not destiny. That’s apostasy and why “fairer worship” isn’t liberation, it’s at most progressive #mainstreaming that wants more inclusive access to the temple, fairer distribution of sacrifices, representation among the priests. That has real short-term value, yes, but it never questions the altar itself.

The #OMN position is different, it focused on stand up, walking out, building something else. So what would a post-religious economics look like? Signal thinking, not worship, markets as tools, not gods, economics as a social science, not divine law. Values decided democratically, not revealed by price. Survival and care as nonnegotiable, growth as optional, not sacred. This aligns directly with our insistence on balancing social value and personal value.

This framing cuts through the mess, calling it religion, we break the spell. People can see faith masquerading as fact, priests masquerading as experts, sacrifice masquerading as necessity, they can no longer pretend this is “just how the world works”. That’s why this language, hashtag story matters. It’s not rhetorical excess – it’s diagnosis. And diagnosis is the first step to composting the #deathcult and planting something that can actually keep people alive.

The shite pile: why almost everything is noise

The shite pile: why almost everything is noise

Most mainstream journalism is not about public truth, it’s about platform survival. This shite pile is why almost everything is noise, what gets called “news” today, when It’s not straight up propaganda is shaped by: attention metrics, outrage cycles, advertiser safety, institutional access, career risk management.

That’s why it feels so empty, even when it’s “factually” correct. The framing is already captured, journalism inside the logic of the #deathcult, wearing progressive, neutral, or technocratic costumes. So yes: most #mainstreaming news is noise, not because it’s all fake, but because it is: structurally irrelevant to challenge lived power, allergic to root causes, incapable of imagining alternatives, It’s mess because it job is to explain the world in ways that prevent change.

Signal vs noise is a useful distinction, signal isn’t “better facts” its orientation. Noise at best tells you a narrow view of what happened today, who said what in this narrow view, which team is winning in this view, how to feel about this. Signal doesn’t chase this novelty, it tracks patterns, power, and consequence.

What would “signal journalism” actually look like? Practically and philosophically, signal journalism would start from social need, not market demand, not “what will people click?” but “what do people need to know to act together?” Signal helps you understand, why things keep happening, who benefits structurally, what capacities are being destroyed or built, where collective agency still exists.

It’s thus explicitly about power, not pretending neutrality where none exists, rather about who is protected and who is exposed. It doesn’t confuse balance with truth, it treats people as participants, not audiences

Traditional media and #dotcons journalism assumes: speaker → audience → consumption.

Signal journalism assumes: participants → shared inquiry → shared action.

Today, too much journalism is caught in this trap. Precarious journalists + algorithmic discipline = fear-driven reporting. When private greed meets public need, this is the path of corruption. Working journalism is supposed to be: a public good, a memory system, a mediation layer for democracy. But the current mess is optimized for: extraction, surveillance, behavioural control, brand safety. So even “good” journalism becomes structurally conservative. This is why reform inside the same platforms fails.

This is where projects like the #OMN matters: shared media, shared process, shared memory. “The capitalism of digital platforms makes labour discipline more rigid… subordinate and precarious at the same time.” The constant “now now now” is a discipline mechanism, its fake urgency.

Signal journalism asks:

what is structurally urgent?

what is manufactured urgency?

what requires patience and continuity?

Why this is an #OMN problem (and opportunity). The OMN was never about “better content”, it is about changing the conditions under which content exists. This is signal journalism: federated publishing, shared archives, transparent process, local grounding, slow trust-building. In other words: social infrastructure first, content second.

On this path #Indymedia worked not because it was perfect, but because it was situated, collective, and accountable to real communities, not metrics.

The hard part – Signal is harder than noise because: it doesn’t flatter identities, it doesn’t reward instant reaction, it often feels boring at first, it requires shared effort over time. Where noise feels alive… If we want journalism that matters, we have to build the soil it can grow in. That’s the #OMN path: less spectacle, more process, less worship, more walking out of the temple.

Pick up the shovel, please.

The #OMN is a simple project

Progressive Mainstreaming

Most progressive #mainstreaming isn’t about ending the #deathcult – it’s about making its worship feel more fair, more inclusive, more polite. There is some real everyday value in this. Fewer people get crushed immediately, some suffering is reduced, that matters.

But let’s be honest about what it does not do, it does not get people off their knees to challenge the altar to stop the sacrifice. It rearranges the seating in the temple, feeding the deeper problem, obedience. Progressive mainstreaming accepts the frame, accepts the metrics, accepts the economy of extraction and then argues about distribution. It negotiates better terms with a machine that is killing us. That is not transformation, it’s managed decline.

The project of real change and challenge – the work the #OMN exists for – starts somewhere else entirely. It starts with people standing up and walking away. Walking out of the temple of the #deathcult we all live in, not in purity, utopia or comfort. But into mess, cooperation, unfinished tools, shared risk, and actual agency. This isn’t about better policies inside the system. It’s about building outside it, under it, alongside it – until the system hollowed itself out and no longer matters.

It’s about people picking up shovels, composting the wreckage, and growing something that can actually sustain life. This is simplicity #KISS #OMN

We have already seen the failures: lived through #Indymedia, the #NGO turn, the #dotcons capture, the #Fediverse repeating old mistakes. When we talk about #OMN, we’re trying to stop people from re-learning the same lessons by losing again. Silence would be complicity.

The #OMN is where critique becomes agency. It’s not about “promoting a project”, if we don’t talk about this without something like #OMN, critique collapses into doom, aesthetics, or personal exits. #OMN is a way to, act collectively, without lying about power, money, or governance.

Forgetting is how capture happens, the moment people stop naming alternatives, the space fills with managerial language, funding logic, and fear-based control. We talk about #OMN to keep the space open enough for something human to grow.

The #OMN is a path that resists #stupidindividualism, where most contemporary “solutions” reinforce isolation, personal brands, and individual safety strategies. #OMN starts from the assumption that survival and meaning are collective. We need to keep talking about this because almost nobody else does.

It’s unfinished – and that matters. It’s not about defending a polished system, instead, it’s about holding open a process. Talking about #OMN is how we invite others into the compost rather than presenting them with a finished product to consume.

We talk about #OMN because it’s a native way of saying: “We don’t have to repeat this. We can build differently, together, if we remember what already worked.”*

It’s not evangelism, it’s stewardship.

A few of us have been working on real, positive, horizontal social and technological solutions for over twenty years. Not hypotheticals, not vibes, things that actually work.

We know they work locally, we know they work socially. And after more than a decade building on the #fediverse, we know they can work in tech, at scale without going vertical, corporate, or authoritarian.

This isn’t speculative any more. Our creative task now – the #nothingnew work – is simply to combine what already works: Horizontal social practice, federated #openweb tech, trust-based governance. We already have a slate of projects waiting to be built: #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback and #makinghistory. What’s missing is not ideas, it is people willing to show up and implement.

And here’s the hard truth: every time we try to talk about radical or progressive language, power, or structure, people retreat into #blocking and ignoring. The same unresolved tensions get replayed endlessly, nothing is mediated, nothing is grounded. Bad will accumulates, the social commons rots.

This rot isn’t accidental – it’s structural – To work our way out of this mess, we need both #fluff and #spiky. We need broad categories to think clearly, the #mainstreaming #fashernista rejection of this isn’t sophistication – it’s submission. It’s a soft, polite form of #deathcult worship.

You don’t dismantle a #deathcult by being nicer to it, you dismantle it by stopping your participation and building something better.

So this is the question, not rhetorical, not theoretical: Are you going to help make this happen? Are you going to pick up a shovel? Or are you going to stay on your knees, arguing about tone while the ground burns?

There is such a thing as society -and the #openweb depends on it

There is such a thing as society. The entire #openweb is built on that assumption 🙂
Deny it, and everything collapses into noise, power grabs, and enclosure. That denial, dressed up today as “post-truth” – is killing us.

Our current media ecology is broken. So called #AI and Google are no longer a useful way to find information about most things that actually matter. This isn’t accidental; it’s a structural #dotcons problem. Extraction, advertising, and algorithmic manipulation have replaced human discovery, context, and trust.

The same sickness runs through much of today’s open-source and free software world. Its governance models are still rooted in medieval political ideas: aristocrats, benevolent dictators, kings and courts. That might have muddled through in the 20th century, but it is obviously useless for the world we now live in.

The last twenty years trying to mediate this with neoliberal #stupidindividualism has only made things worse. The result is towering piles of steaming #techshit, endlessly churned, rarely useful, and increasingly disconnected from any healthy social reality. This is the #geekproblem made in: code, silicon and concrete.

The #mainstreaming disaster driven by #dotcons is obvious. We don’t need to relitigate it every five minutes. For motivation and clarity, let’s put them to one side and focus on what we can actually change. Our own tech culture is still hopelessly mired in the #geekproblem. So yes, we need to compost a lot of our own mess.

The path out of both the #closedweb and the geek cul-de-sac is not new. It’s old, boring, and powerful: trust, shared responsibility, and human-scale democracy. If we are serious, the #openweb has to be rebooted with grassroots democracy at its core. Social tech needs social governance. Without that, we are just recreating vertical power with nicer licences.

This is where #OGB (Open Governance Bodies) matter. With real democratic process, it becomes relatively simple to push the #dotcons back out of spaces they currently dominate by default. Without democracy, they will always win, not because they are smarter, but because they are organised.

Right now, we are drowning in the #mainstreaming mess. And worse, we are still adding to it. Every pointless project, every ego-driven fork, every governance-free platform accelerates #techchurn and deepens the rot. We need to stop pretending this is neutral.

Yes, “open standards” are a mess, always have been, but they are the mess we must build on until enough of the #openweb is rebooted – including democratic decision-making – to rejuvenate and civilise the standards bodies themselves. Strong democracy changes the game. With it, enclosure becomes contestable. Without it, we just get louder arguments and faster failure.

If you care about this direction, add a statement of support here https://unite.openworlds.info/…/wiki/Statements-of-support You don’t need permission. You don’t need to convince everyone. You need to show up and help build.

And when people doing obviously stupid things can’t understand what the #OMN hashtags mean? Click the hashtags and think, or stand and shout, then hit the block button. You get to choose 🙂 This is not rudeness, it’s focus. And focus is how we stop adding to the mess and start composting it into something that might actually grow.

LLM`s and the openweb

The debate about so called #AI and large language models inside the #openweb paths is not, at its core, a technical argument. It is a question of relationship. Not “is this tool good or bad?” but how is it used, who controls it, and whose interests it serves.

This tension is not new, every wave of open communication technology has arrived carrying the same anxiety: printing presses, telephones, email, the web itself. Each was accused – often correctly – of flattening culture, centralising power and then when enclosed eroding human connection. And yet, each was also reclaimed, repurposed, and bent toward collective use when used within humanistic social structures. The #openweb path was obviously never about rejecting technology, it was about refusing enclosure.

On the #FOSS and the #openweb, we have always understood that tools are political. Not only because they contain ideology in their code, but because they embody power relations in how they are built, owned, governed, and deployed. The #OMN project grew from this understanding, it isn’t an anti-tech project, it is a re-grounding of technology in social process: trust-based publishing, local autonomy, messy collaboration, and human-scale governance. On this path we have to constantly balance the #geekproblem that servers mattered less than relationships, code mattered less than continuity.

#LLMs arrive into this tradition not as something unprecedented, but as something familiar: a tool emerging inside systems that are deeply broken. The danger is not that LLMs exist, the danger is that they are being normalised inside closed, extractive, #dotcons infrastructures.

What makes LLMs unsettling is not intelligence, they have none, It’s proximity. They sit close to language, meaning, memory, synthesis, things humans associate with thought, culture, and identity. When an LLM speaks fluently without being feed lived experience, then yes, it can feel hollow, verbose, even uncanny. This is the “paid-by-the-word” reaction many people have: form without presence, articulation without accountability. This discomfort is valid.

But confusing discomfort with real danger leads to the wrong response. #LLMs do not have agency, consciousness, or ethics, they don’t take responsibility, they cannot sit in a meeting, be accountable to a community, or live with the consequences of what they produce. Which means the responsibility is entirely ours. Just like with publishing tools, encryption, or federated protocols.

Much of the current backlash against “AI” is not about facts. It’s about vibe. People aren’t only disputing accuracy or pointing to errors. They’re saying: “This feels wrong.” That instinct is worth listening to, but it’s not enough. The #openweb tradition asks harder questions:

Who controls the infrastructure?
Can this tool be used without enclosure?
Can its outputs be traced, contextualised, and contested?
Does it strengthen collective capacity, or replace it?
Does it help people build, remember, translate, and connect, or does it manufacture authority?

An LLM used to simulate “wisdom”, speak for communities, and replace lived participation is rightly rejected. That is automation of voice, not amplification of agency. But an LLM used as:

an archive index
a translation layer
a research assistant
a memory prosthetic
a bridge between fragmented histories

…can work within in a humanistic path if it is embedded in transparent, accountable, human governance. The #openweb lesson has always been the same: you don’t wait for systems to fail – you build alongside them until they are no longer needed. On this path #LLMs will become infrastructure, the real question is whether they are integrated into: Closed corporate stacks, surveillance capitalism, and narrative control or federated, inspectable, collectively governed knowledge commons.

If the open web does not claim this space, authoritarian systems will. This is not about fetishising this so-called AI, nor about rejecting it on moral grounds. Both are forms of avoidance. The #OMN path is pragmatic:

build parallel systems
insist on open processes
embed tools in social trust
keep humans in the loop
keep power contestable

#LLMs can’t and don’t need to understand spirit, culture, or community, humans do. What matters is whether we remain grounded while using tools – or whether we outsource judgment, memory, and meaning to systems that cannot be accountable.

Every generation of the open tech faces this moment, and every time, the answer needs to be not purity, but practice. Not withdrawal, but responsibility. Not fear, but composting the mess and planting something better. #LLMs are just the latest shovel, the question is whether we use them to deepen the enclosure, or to help dig our way out.

On the #OMN and #openweb paths, the answer has never been abstract. It has always been: build, govern, and care – together.

On the #openweb path, what “prat” means

On the #OMN and #openweb paths, when I talk about not being a “prat”, am not talking about a personal insult in the everyday sense, I am naming a pattern of behaviour that actively blocks collective work, let’s be explicit. A prat is someone who:

Performs critique instead of doing the work

They talk about problems endlessly but won’t touch the shovel. They judge seeds for not being trees. They dismiss unfinished work while contributing nothing usable themselves. This isn’t accountability – it’s avoidance dressed as intelligence.

Defaults to vertical thinking in horizontal spaces

They try to manage, gatekeep, or “correct” instead of co-creating. In #OMN terms, this is importing #dotcons logic into open systems.

Treats values as weapons, not commitments

They quote rules, codes, or ideals to hit people with, not to strengthen the commons or protect the vulnerable. A code of conduct, used this way, becomes a club. The prat believes they’re being ethical – while undermining ethics in practice.

Confuses identity with contribution

They think being right, being radical, or being aligned is more important than building something that works. This is #fashionista behaviour: aesthetic politics, purity signalling, zero tolerance for mess.

Can’t handle undefined space

They panic when things aren’t: Finished, branded, institutionally sanctioned, measurable in platform metrics. Because #openweb work is by nature undefined, they respond with fear, defensiveness, or hostility. This is where “VERY negative when challenged” shows up.

Redirects anger

Their frustration is often justified, but it gets aimed at: Other builders, messy experiments, imperfect allies. Instead of: Centralized power, enclosure, #dotcons capture, #deathcult economics. This is how movements eat themselves.

What “prat” does not mean

It does not mean: Someone asking honest questions, someone disagreeing in good faith, someone making mistakes, someone learning in public. Mess, failure, argument is allowed. Blocking isn’t.

Why this matters

The #openweb only exists if people are free to: Start badly, iterate publicly, cooperate loosely, build trust over time. Prat behaviour shuts this down by: Discouraging participation, freezing experimentation, replacing process with performance. That’s why we say it plainly, not to shame – but to clear the path.

The simple rule (#KISS)

If you’re not helping build, not helping others build, not protecting the space for building. Then stop throwing rocks, pick up a shovel, or step aside. That’s what we mean by “don’t be a prat” on the #OMN and #openweb paths.