One of the successes of neoliberal capitalism has been convincing us that we’re paying less while actually paying more. They promise lower taxes, then they privatise the services, health insurance becomes a private tax, car finance becomes a transport tax, rent becomes a housing tax, student debt becomes an education tax. The electricity surcharge for AI data centres becomes another hidden tax.
You voted to reduce taxes, but all that happened was public taxes became private payments to corporations. A vote for “tax cuts” too becomes a vote for hidden taxes. The same trick plays out across the digital world. We’re encouraged to embrace platforms and AI systems that consume enormous amounts of energy, degrade the quality of public knowledge, undermine independent publishing, harvest our personal data, and concentrate even more power in the hands of a handful of tech oligarchs.
We’re told this is innovation, but it’s mostly enclosure. The latest scandals around Elon Musk and his political networks aren’t the real story. They’re symptoms of a deeper problem. Billionaires don’t simply own companies, they increasingly shape media, public debate, infrastructure and politics itself.
This is what the #deathcult looks like in practice: private wealth buying public power. One path we can take is not simply replacing one billionaire with another or one political party with another, it’s rebuilding the commons. Public goods instead of private monopolies, community media instead of billionaire media, the #openweb instead of the #dotcons and economic democracy instead of oligarchy.
That’s why #OMN exists – not simply to criticise the mess, but to build practical alternatives to mediate the mess as the next crisis arrives.
People sometimes ask why I use the hashtag #deathcult. It isn’t just a provocative label, it is to name the dominant political and economic logic that has shaped the last forty years. By #deathcult, I mean the era of #neoliberalism: a system that treats endless economic growth, privatisation and competition as unquestionable “common sense,” even when the consequences are ecological collapse, growing inequality and social breakdown.
I call it a cult because, like any successful ideology, it becomes difficult to see from the inside. Its assumptions become so normal that alternatives appear impossible. Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, “There Is No Alternative,” sums this up perfectly. The “death” part has become harder to ignore, due to movements like #XR (Extinction Rebellion), the reality of #climatechaos has entered mainstream discussion. We can now see that continuing on our current path means ecological collapse, mass displacement and the deaths of millions – and displacement of billions – of people over the coming century.
Of course, neoliberalism is not something entirely new. It is an extreme form of capitalism, and history has seen similar periods before. One example is Britain’s response to the Irish Potato Famine, where market ideology took precedence over human need, contributing to mass starvation, displacement and suffering.
After the Second World War, many countries moved towards forms of social democracy. Capitalism was softened by stronger public services, labour rights and welfare systems. These reforms were far from perfect, but they recognised that completely unrestrained markets created instability and injustice. In part this “liberal golden” era was held in place by there being an alternative of soviet communism.
From the late 1970s onwards, much of that understanding was forgotten. Deregulation, privatisation and financialisation became the dominant ideology once again. Politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders represent attempts to move back towards that earlier social democratic settlement. Though this compromise path of social democracy is not a final answer, as it still operates within capitalism, but it is certainly preferable to the #neoliberal model that currently dominates. As radicals, though, we should aim higher. We need to build systems based on commons, cooperation, ecological responsibility and democratic participation, not simply manage capitalism more fairly.
This is where #OMN (Open Media Network) comes in. The problems we face are not only economic, they are also about communication. Today’s digital infrastructure is dominated by #dotcons: corporate platforms that monetise attention, shape public debate and concentrate power. Facebook, Google, Apple, X and similar platforms have become essential infrastructure while remaining accountable only to capital rather than communities.
The answer isn’t simply better regulation, it’s rebuilding the #openweb. Like the #Fediverse, the #OMN is one small contribution towards this path: creating media and communication infrastructure based on the #4opens – Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards and Open Process – so communities can shape their own communication instead of renting it from billion-dollar corporations.
People also ask why I use so many hashtags, the answer is simple, the web is made from links. Hashtags are one of the few linking technologies that work across platforms. They allow conversations to escape individual silos and become discoverable across the wider web. They are not meant to replace ideas; they are signposts pointing towards larger conversations that matter. Yes, they can look cryptic, but every shared language starts somewhere. If we never create language for new problems, we remain only trapped inside the vocabulary of the systems we’re trying to change and challenge.
Changing language doesn’t change the world by itself, but it can change how we think about the world, and changing the conversation is often the first step towards changing society itself. That’s why I still use #deathcult, not as an insult, but as a way of naming a system whose destructive logic has become so familiar that people struggle to imagine anything different. The challenge now is not simply to criticise that system, it is to build practical alternatives.
For those who like to believe in social democracy, this isn’t an argument against the gains it has won. Strong public services, workers’ rights, progressive taxation and democratic institutions have all made life better for millions. They matter, and they are worth defending.
But we should also recognise their limits. As long as investment and production remain under the control of capital, democracy stops at the workplace door. We get to vote for governments, but rarely over what our economies produce, how resources are used, or whose needs come first.
The next step is not simply kinder capitalism, but extending democratic principles into the economy itself. Building commons, cooperatives, public ownership where appropriate, community governance, and digital infrastructure that people collectively control. That’s the direction #OMN points towards: not replacing one elitist crew with another, but growing the practical foundations of economic democracy from the grassroots up.
There’s a common understanding that we’re living inside a new digital world, that feels like enclosure, where people are “controlled” by platforms they can’t easily leave, where behaviour is shaped at scale, and where #AI intensifies this mess. That’s why #fashernista terms like #technofeudalism are being used to argue that we’ve moved beyond capitalism into something different – a system based not primarily on profit, but on rent extraction through “cloud capital.” In this narrow framing:
Capitalism = wage labour, markets, profit from production
Technofeudalism = platform power, behavioural capture, rent from digital dependency
The “cloud lords” (Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple etc.) operate their digital fiefdoms, making us the “cloud serfs” by producing data and metadata for free. This generating value through participation while feeding tech that learn from us and reshape our behaviour. Even businesses and workers are pulled in, sellers depend on Amazon marketplaces, workers are managed through platform systems and, as the #EU is finding, entire infrastructures depend on AWS-style cloud provision.
From this narrowing view, capitalism starts to look secondary to rent extraction. But is this actually a new economic system? The argument soon starts to break down as critics point out that many of these dynamics are not historically new: supermarkets already control supply chains and choice, advertising has shaped desire for decades, monopolies are standard capitalist patterns and enclosure of markets predates the internet by centuries.
Even “lock-in” effects (like Amazon Prime convenience or #dotcons platform dependency) can be explained through normal capitalist mechanisms: convenience, pricing, network effects, and infrastructure dominance. From this step back view, what we’re seeing is not a new epoch, but late-stage capitalism with intensified digital tools, not a structural break.
The more grounded #OMN suggests something different, the change is not mystical “cloud feudalism”, but that data and metadata has become a primary economic resource. We now live in systems where behaviour is continuously captured as data, that data to be aggregated, sold, and operationalised, then feedback loops reshape what people do next and participation itself becomes productive labour. This shifts relationships, not only worker vs capitalist, not just consumer vs market, but user-as-infrastructure. Yes, people are no longer only buying and selling inside systems, they are constituting the system itself through participation. That is a shift in how production works, even if it doesn’t replace capitalism as the structure, it is reshaping it.
The infrastructural question? Where the #technofeudal framing becomes useful is infrastructure. The real power isn’t only in apps or interfaces, it is in “cloud” hosting (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure), database and compute control and the resulting dependency of entire industries on a few providers. This is less “digital shopkeeping” and more systemic dependency at the infrastructure layer. At that level, switching costs are enormous, entire economies are built on top of systems owned by a handful of #nastyfew actors. Yes, this is a real enclosure of the commons, not of in the old sense land, but of the new digital reality.
Where this leaves us? The danger is less about whether we label this “capitalism” or “technofeudalism”, more, it’s the simple assumption that the system is stable. In reality, we have capitalist dynamics operating the data-driven extraction layered on top of this older mess, with infrastructure consolidation amplifying both. Not a clean break – more a messy transition stage.
From an #OMN perspective, the useful question is not the label, it is where is agency located? Who controls infrastructure? How is knowledge produced and shared? What forms of network are open vs enclosed? Because whether we call it capitalism or #technofeudalism, the political problem is the same that control is concentrating, while participation is being harvested. And that is the mess we need to compost, not the theoretical naming of it.
Let’s look at a #fluffy positive view of the path we need to be on. We are living through a dangerous moment, the systems around us are failing, but the dominant response is still denial at worst or to try to repair the existing structures that created the crisis at best. But, the problem is not one bad policy, one bad company, or one bad government. The problem is a whole way of organising society around extraction, scale, speed and distance.
A system that measures success through endless economic growth has turned the living world into a resource pool, nature becomes something to consume, our communities become markets. People become workers and consumers to turn relationships into transactions. This is the logic of the #deathcult – the belief that there is no alternative to the endless expansion of production, consumption and competition.
But there are very different stories, for most of human history, people lived through relationships with place, community and the natural world. When knowledge was rooted in local experience, skills grew through connection, culture evolved through diversity. The problem is not that humans are incapable of living differently. The problem is that we built systems that separate us from the consequences of our actions. A global supply chain moves food thousands of miles while hiding the real costs. A corporation extracting value from a place without being accountable to the people who live there. A financial system creates wealth for a few while pushing the damage onto everyone else.
The result is not just ecological damage, it is cultural damage to the shared humanist knowledge, ecology, stories and local power. The process that creates monoculture in culture and thinking, when everything becomes standardised, the same products, platforms, economic assumptions, the same idea that progress means becoming more disconnected. This is where the old path of humanism and resulting localisation becomes important. Localisation is not about retreating from the world, it is not about small communities ignoring global problems. It is about rebuilding the connections that make society healthy, creating economies where people can see the impact of their choices.
This is where the #OMN story connects, the Open Media Network is not just about publishing tools, it is about rebuilding the missing social layer. The #openweb originally grew from the idea that people could connect, collaborate and create outside centralised control. It was messy, diverse and alive, in till the #closedweb enclosed this with #dotcons platforms designed around attention extraction, surveillance and profit.
The work of composting this mess is not simply building another platform, it is more about rebuilding culture. We need “native” networks that support local voices to connect #4opens globally to bridge a diversity of communities, ideas and ways of living. Not one giant system trying to manage everyone, we need a garden, not a factory. The challenge is that technical decentralisation on its own is not enough, a network can be decentralised and still reproduce the same problems. We need decentralised power, not just decentralised technology.
The exciting thing is that this is already happening, across the world people are rebuilding commons, the #Fediverse, creating alternative economies, restoring ecosystems and forming communities of resistance and care both online and offline. These stories rarely appear in the mainstream because the #mainstreaming is built around crisis, competition and spectacle. But underneath the noise, seeds are growing. This is why we need to stop only fighting the broken system to also grow alternatives.
Build tools that strengthen communities instead of replacing them.
Move from consumers back into participants.
From isolated individuals back into connected communities.
A movement is not created by everyone agreeing on one answer, a movement grows through many different experiments, connected by shared values. The future is not something we wait for, it is something we build. A flourishing society will not come from making the current system more efficient. It will come from growing something different.
But we also need to be honest about the scale of the challenge. The #deathcult does not simply disappear because we build nicer alternatives. It has power, institutions, money, media, infrastructure and the ability to absorb, dilute and sell back every challenge. This is where many #fluffy movements fail, they mistake visibility for power, mistake inclusion in existing systems for change. They mistake being allowed a seat at the table, for changing who owns the table.
The current system is very good at taking the language of resistance and turning it into another product. It can sell sustainability while accelerating extraction, sell community while building more isolation, sell “open” while creating new forms of enclosure.
This is why the #spiky#OMN is not about creating another nice corner inside the existing mess, the path is not to make the #dotcons slightly less harmful. This path is to grow a tech native humanistic network, an alternative that can change and challenge, culturally, socially and practically. Because the battle is not only over technology or economics, it is over imagination. For decades, we have been trained to believe there is no alternative. That large-scale capitalistic paths are inevitable, humans are just consumers, that communities are outdated, that efficiency matters more than resilience.
The deepest enclosure is of our minds, to break this we need both the fluffy and the spiky path. The fluffy grows gardens, relationships and commons. The spiky challenges the structures that keep the garden fenced in. Without the fluffy, to easily resistance becomes empty anger. Without the spiky, alternatives become harmless hobbies that the system can ignore. We need both, people building the new while also questioning the old.
Because the future will not be gifted to us by governments, corporations or platforms, it will be built by people organising together. The question is not whether change is possible, it is whether we organise enough, quickly enough, to make the possible real. Now we need the compost, the networks and the collective effort to help change and challenge grow.
A red warning for extreme heat has been issued across parts of the UK this week, including London. For people this heatwave across Europe feels frightening, not because of the temperatures themselves, but of what they imply. Nights stay hot, bodies don’t recover, systems don’t cool down. The baseline is shifting. The question that keeps coming up is simple and unavoidable – if this is what it’s like now, what is it like in 10, 20, 30 years? The answer is not uncertain, it is more heat, more extremes, more instability. There is no “new normal” coming, there is only escalating #climatechaos.
A #deathcult sect for the last 40 years was not built to survive itself, we are seeing this now, the infrastructure is failing. Hospitals, transport systems, housing, food networks – all were built for a climate that no longer exists. Even basic adaptation like cooling is uneven, fragile, and socially unequal. Some workplaces fail under heat stress. Some people have no protection at all. And crucially, we are still not adapting at the scale required.
The UK Climate Change Committee has already said it clearly, adaptation is too slow, stalled, or moving in the wrong direction. That is not a warning about the future, it is a #KISS description of failure in the present. The denial loop over the last 20 years is why we are in such a mess, the pattern is now obvious:
Scientists warn
Media briefly reports
Heat passes
Politics resets to “normal”
Nothing changes
This cycle repeats while emissions continue and global temperatures rise toward 2–3°C and beyond this century. But bland media coverage hides the issues of extremes – heatwaves, floods, droughts, system shocks. And those are already exceeding earlier projections in many regions. Timid climate models underestimating reality due to feedback loops, jet stream disruption, aerosol reduction effects, and regional amplification. We are not just entering a warmer world, we are entering a more unstable one.
Knock-on effects are the real ongoing crisis, the danger is not only heat, it is cascading system failure:
food production under stress
rising prices and political instability
insurance withdrawal from entire regions
economic shocks from simultaneous disasters
infrastructure collapse under compounding extremes
This will obviously trigger the most severe global financial instability in modern history. And then there are the wildcard risks – #WAMOC weakening or collapse, Amazon dieback leading to abrupt regional climate shifts. It is not just science fiction, they are known systemic risks inside a destabilising ecological earth system.
One thing we need to talk about and be more clear on is #climatechaos is #classwar. This mess is not experienced equally, the rich (most of the #nastyfew) up to a point when they die of old age can adapt individually, with industrial air conditioning, private infrastructure, relocation options to second homes in safer climates. While everyone else absorbs the breakdown of overheated housing, unsafe work conditions, failing public services and the resulting rising costs of survival.
This is why #climatechaos is also a strong class issue, the crisis is not just physical, it is political due to the visible distribution of risk and protection. After ten years of warnings, many of us were already naming this:
At the time it was still framed as prediction, now it is reality. The uncomfortable truth is not that we were wrong, it is that nothing meaningful was done at scale. One thing we have learned, that we understand more clearly now is it is not an information problem, it’s a systems’ problem.
Extraction-based economies cannot easily respond to limits
Attention-based media cannot communicate slow crisis
Electoral politics cannot act on long time horizons
So the system produces delay, distraction, and denial even as conditions worsen. There is a strong role of the #dotcons in this mess as the big social media platforms have intensify this failure. They spent the last ten year optimise for outrage, fragmentation, consumption and finally forgetting. Crisis becomes a series of disconnected moments rather than a shared progressive long-term struggle. Each event resets attention to zero, memory does not accumulate. This is not an accident – it is structural.
Why #4opens matters now, becomes more important, not less, this is not the normal #mainstreaming liberal ideology. It is #KISS basic resilience infrastructure, as surviving #climatechaos requires collective intelligence that can persist across time, crises, and institutional failure, we need tecnolagy like the #OMN that can help medate this:
Closed systems concentrate control.
Open systems distribute survival capacity.
But under all this the missing layer is meaning, one of the biggest underestimates from the last decade is psychological – people are not only resisting facts, they are defending meaning – belief in control, belief in technological rescue, belief in stability returning. But these #mainstreaming stories no longer match reality, but this denial persists, not because people don’t know, but because they cannot yet replace the blinded liberal stories. This is where change actually happens,not just information, but shared meaning and practice.
What changes now? Ten years ago the message was, stop feeding the system causing the crisis, now the message is build the systems that can survive what is already here. That means:
The point is not purity of language, its growing commons of action and hashtags are a tool for this.
As we see today, we are not approaching #climatechaos, we are inside it. The urgent question now is whether we can build systems – social, technical, and cultural – that can function while it unfolds or we keep letting things fail.
That is the #OMN challenge, and it is already overdue.
Let’s be clear on the background mess, before the personal attacks start, this is not about individuals. It is about patterns, systems and ideas. The danger is that criticism becomes an #adHominem argument – “you just dislike this because…” – instead of looking at the actual structures being discussed.
The point I am making is that parts of dead #postmodern thinking have ended up embedded inside #neoliberal culture: fragmentation, individual identity, endless discourse and difficulty building any shared collective action. That does not mean every idea, person or piece of work in those spaces is the same, it means we need to look at how ideas interact with power.
The question is – What helps us build collective capacity in a time of #climatechaos, inequality and the #dotcons mess? What creates commons? What creates shared action? This is the conversation.
So with that in mind lets look at the major problem with the #dotcons attention economy the advertising model. The platform logic and the attention economy are now becoming harder to simply ignore. For most of mass media history, the commercial transformation of media was hidden behind a layer of journalism, culture and public value. The advertising model was presented as simply a way to pay for content. Platforms were presented as neutral spaces for communication. Algorithms were presented as tools to help people discover what mattered.
But the #dotcons direction has now stripped this bare – the direction has become clearer, the media landscape looks less like a place for shared knowledge and more like a shopping catalogue with occasional content attached. The focus is no longer even the fig leaf of informing people, connecting communities or building public understanding. The naked goal is simple – more clicks, more engagement, more time captured, more data collected and more consumption encouraged. This is the logic of the #dotcons.
The problem with this #deathcult worshipping mess is not only that companies make money. The deeper problem is that the structures built around making money reshape our culture itself. When attention becomes the product, everything starts being measured through extraction. A story is only valuable because it generates traffic – A person is only valuable because they generate data – A community is valuable because it creates engagement – A conversation is valuable because it keeps people inside the platforms. Any, social value gets pushed aside.
The original #openweb grew from a different idea. People built websites, forums, mailing lists, software projects and communities because they wanted to share, collaborate and create. The value was not only in the information produced, the value was in the surrounding relationships. People corrected each other, developed trust, knowledge was maintained collectively.
The internet worked because there was social infrastructure around the technical infrastructure. The mess we made, was thinking that communication could simply be handed over to commercial platforms without catastrophic changing the nature of communication itself. A platform is not just a tool, it comes with incentives, has owners, rules, a business model. When every space becomes a marketplace, the culture changes.
The mess we have made is that extraction replaces participation, the #dotcons path works by turning human activity into resources. People create, platforms capture. Communities produce culture, companies monetise attention. That extraction eventually damages the thing being extracted from, creators become exhausted, communities fragmented, trust declines as people become audiences instead of participants.
The internet becomes full of “content”, but much poorer in meaning, more information does not automatically create more knowledge, more communication does not automatically create better communities, without care, context and collective responsibility, abundance becomes noise. To compost this mess we have made in the media tech path – the question is not “How do we get more people producing?” The question is “How do we build systems where what people produce strengthens the commons instead of feeding extraction?”
The fashionable people of #AI are pushing at changing the scale of content creation, lowering barriers to producing books, apps, music, legal documents and academic papers. Thus, “output” is exploding. But the #OMN second question is what happens when production grows faster than the ability to filter, discuss, trust and maintain? More books, but more noise, More apps, but more clutter. More papers, more pressure on review systems, more music, but harder to value human creativity.
The #dotcons logic says: more content = more value. The #openweb lesson is different – value comes from communities, trust, context and care. We don’t just need more production, we need better commons, better mediation and better ways to separate signal from noise.
The current wave of generative AI (#GenAI) is presented as inevitable, the message is everywhere: adapt, adopt, integrate, or be left behind. But technology is not neutral, as every tool carries assumptions – who benefits, who controls, what values are embedded, and what damage is accepted as “the price of progress”.
From a #OMN perspective, the question is not simply “can this technology do impressive things?” Of course, it can. The question is what kind of society does this technology build? Does it strengthen human creativity, collective intelligence and open participation? Or does it deepen the existing #dotcons path of centralisation, extraction, dependency and enclosure? The promise and the reality of large language models (#LLM) represent a technical development, they can summarise information, translate languages, generate text, assist coding, and help people interact with large amounts of information. These are real, if floored capabilities.
But the current #techshit hype jumps from useful assistance to much bigger claims: that these systems will replace expertise, solve social problems, revolutionise education, transform science, and create a better future. This is currently not true, and, on the LLM path will never be true as the current GenAI systems do not understand the world. They generate likely patterns based on huge amounts of training data. They do not know truth from falsehood, meaning from appearance, or ethics from probability, a convincing answer is not the same as a system that understands. This matters because the native #openweb was built on a different idea, that knowledge comes from people, communities, discussion, correction and shared responsibility.
The #geekproblem is confusing capability with wisdom is a recurring problem in technology culture – it is the assumption that if something can be built, it should be built. The technical question becomes “Can we?” while the social question “Should we?” gets pushed aside. This is part of what #OMN calls the #geekproblem – the tendency to reduce complex social questions into technical problems. A better search algorithm does not automatically create a healthier information system, a faster way to generate content does not automatically create better knowledge. More automation does not automatically create more freedom. The missing piece is the social context around the technology.
Then we come to the ecological cost of scaling, the current GenAI boom depends on enormous infrastructure. In the era of out of control #climatechaos data centres require huge amounts of electricity, water for cooling, specialised hardware, constant replacement cycles leading to massive extraction of resources. At a time of #climatechaos, we should be asking whether increasing consumption is the only path available.
The lesson is not that technology is bad, the lesson is that technology without social responsibility becomes a tool for whoever already has power. The question is not “how do we make AI bigger?” more it is how do we make technology serve human communities rather than making communities serve technology control systems, it is about who controls. The current dominant systems are owned by a few powerful companies controlled by the #nastyfew actively working to destroy our ecology and societies.
The future is not decided by whether we use AI, it is decided by whether we allow the same old #dotcons logic to shape every new technology. The work remains the same to build alternatives, keep processes open, grow the commons. The answer is not simply rejecting technology, the #openweb has never been anti-technology. The question is what kind of technology grows from what kind of culture. We need tools that strengthen human networks, not replace them. Tools that support commons, not enclosure, that increase agency, not dependency.
If we change this can there be an ethical AI? A socially useful technology? Possibly, but it would require a very different path, it would need many of the things the #openweb has argued for from the beginning.
The recurring argument around violence and nonviolence gets trapped in a false choice. One side says “Violence is never the answer.” the other says “Violence is the only thing that has ever changed history.” Both are truth, but both miss real working humanistic paths. So, what kind of society creates the conditions where violence becomes the only option?
A first step is looking at the systems, cultures and social infrastructure that shape how people respond to conflict. If we want people to choose nonviolent methods, then those methods have to actually work. People need meaningful ways to participate, organise, challenge power and create change. Protest without consequence, dialogue without accountability and institutions that ignore people create dangerous paths.
When people feel that peaceful routes are closed, violence becomes a real option. But there is a second social problem to look at – violence is not just a tool, it creates its own culture. A movement built around destruction can easily reproduce the same power structures it fought against. Removing one oppressive system does not automatically create a better one, without new social foundations, history shows new forms of domination grow from the ruins.
Yes, history is written through moments of confrontation, but the is deeper work happens before and after those moments – building the commons that allow people to organise differently. This is where the #openweb lesson matters, change is not only about removing something, it is about building something. The strongest movements create alternatives – new relationships – new institutions – new forms of cooperation – new ways to share knowledge and power.
To build meaningfull alternatives we have to start by compostsing commen sense mess. What meany people do not understand is that our states are based on violence, what we see as private property is based on violence, just about everything we hold and touch is founded on violence. But when we look wider, a narow posative view is the state monopoly on violence is only legitimate when the state itself remains accountable to people. When power becomes accountable only upwards – to wealth, corporations or institutions – then the monopoly becomes simply control.
The same applies to grassroots movements, a movement cannot claim liberation while creating unaccountable power inside itself. The #geekproblem appears here too, reducing social problems to technical solutions – “Use violence.” – “Never use violence.” are simple answers to complex social questions. The harder work is asking, why are people unheard? Why do peaceful methods fail? Who controls the institutions? What alternatives exist? How can we build systems where people have agency before conflict reaches breaking point?
The #OMN path is not about pretending conflict does not exist, it is about understanding that the long-term answer is not simply winning a hard short fight. It is slower, growing a culture where fewer fights become necessary. The #4opens is part of this – transparent processes, shared ownership and accountable structures are not side issues. They are a foundation that allows movements to stay democratic instead of becoming another “common sense” version of the mess they oppose.
Violence is often a symptom, the deeper question is what social conditions keep producing it.
There is a recurring problem in modern activism and alternative movements, the attempt to remove the uncomfortable parts, everything has to be friendly, to be safe, to be acceptable. The difficult questions, the conflicts, the power arguments, the risks and the sharper edges get pushed aside because they are seen as “too political”, “too negative” or “too confrontational”. This mess is where the #dotcons culture creeps in.
The same platforms that turned social interaction into engagement metrics, outrage cycles and data extraction have also shaped how many people think activism should work. The result is a kind of “fluffy activism” that wants the community feeling without the struggle.
The problem is affective change has both a fluffy and a spiky side. The fluffy path matters – welcoming people, building bridges, creating spaces where people can participate by making things accessible. Without this, movements become closed circles talking only to themselves. But the spiky path matters too – who has power, controls the infrastructure, benefits? What happens when things become inconvenient? What happens when a movement actually challenges something? Without the spiky side, activism becomes a performance, a nice-looking community space that threatens nothing.
The big (and nasty) mistake is thinking these paths are opposites, they are not, a healthy movement needs both. Let’s look at examples of this – the convenience trap, when activists building their organising on corporate platforms. Google Drive – Google Docs – WhatsApp are convenient tools, they are familiar to non alt people. Everyone on mainstreaming paths already has them. But convenience is not the same as freedom. The #dotcons did not only capture technology, they captured imagination by teaching people that the easiest path is the best path – Click here – Sign in – Join the platform – Build the community.
If your activism is affective it will become politically “spiky”. Power will push back, first as a legal threat, then depending on these #dotcons systems without understanding the risks is not a clever strategy, it is a prat move. Not because these companies are secretly waiting to attack activists, the issue is structural, #dotcons are designed around – Centralised control – Data collection – Account management – Legal compliance, they are not designed as activist infrastructure.
The #metadata problem, many #fluffy people think “If the messages are private, everything is fine.” But modern investigations are not about message content, metadata matters. Who communicated? When? Where? With whom? How often? What accounts connect together? A simple court order will turn information held by digital platform into evidence. This is not a theoretical problem, it is how legal systems works. The platform does not need to share your goals, it does not need to agree with your politics, it simply responds to legal processes.
The bigger issue is not only the tools, removing the “debate” is the real problem. Often when someone raises concerns, the response is: “You are being negative.” “You are making people uncomfortable.” “You are scaring people away.” This is where the fluffy path becomes harmful, because removing the spiky conversation does not remove the risks, it removes the ability to care. A movement that cannot discuss power, security and infrastructure honestly is not actually inclusive, it is fragile.
A movement needs places where people can collaborate openly, while also respecting the need for protection. The point is not fear, not an argument to stop using every convenient tools. Reality is messy, people use what works. The point is awareness about understanding the trade-offs. Activism needs both the fluffy path that welcomes people and the spiky path that understands power. Lose either one and you get problems. When you block the debate – Only fluffy becomes harmless – Only spiky becomes exhausting.
The future needs movements that can build, care, challenge and defend. Blocking this conversation because it is uncomfortable is not kindness, it is removing part of the debate and that is a very prat move.
The #oxfordboaters use of #dotcons highlights a problem. Using closed platforms is dangerous from the #spiky side – control, permissions, access, dependency. But from the #fluffy side, the problem is different, it becomes too complicated and impenetrable for normal people to join.
The result is a tiny self-selecting group running the process, this is in no way democratic or affective. Then the campaign finishes, accounts disappear, permissions change, people move on, and the collective memory is lost. We repeat the same cycle every 5–10 years – New people arrive, the same problems are rediscovered, the lesson has disappeared. That is not a sustainable movement, basic activism needs memory.
It needs open processes, shared archives and structures that people can actually understand and participate in. The #openweb lesson is simple, if your organising leaves no commons behind, you are constantly rebuilding from zero, losing basic memory is not bad luck, it is a basic design failure, and is a very normal problem for naive, blocking crew who try and dominate fresh campaigning.
Please build things that future people can inherit.
One of the things missing from conversations about rebuilding radical networks is that we defult to looking first at the technology. The #OMN question is different – What are the social systems that allow alternatives to survive?
A useful example comes from the history of the Rainbow Gatherings. To an outsider, the strangest thing about a Rainbow Gathering is likely the hippies, the second is the absence of money. Thousands of people gather in forests, share food, organise care, create culture and then disappear again – without tickets, vendors or commercial stages. This can look like a quirky tradition, but there are lessons – the absence of commerce was never just a rule, it was the point. The idea was simple – If you want to show that another society is possible, you cannot only argue against the existing system, you have to create a working alternative.
The non-commercial path was the message, a living example of a working alternative logic. The early Rainbow organisers came out of the Vietnam War veterans and the antiwar counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were asking a question that still matters – How do you challenge a system built around war, competition, consumption and hierarchy? One answer was confrontation, another answer was demonstration. the rainbow path was instead of only fighting the existing culture, was to create a space where different values operate with shared resources, mutual aid, no buying and selling, no central authority. People contributing what they can and receiving what they need.
The Free Store experiments and early free festivals showed this approach in practice. The gathering itself became temporary commons – a place where the normal rules of the market were suspended. The important part was not the camping, not the festival. It is the social infrastructure underneath – Food does not appear magically, care does not happen automatically, conflict does not disappear.
A commons requires trust, participation, shared responsibility, informal governance and a culture of contribution. This is the part missing from technology discussions, people imagine the #openweb as about tools – Protocols – Platforms – Software. But the deeper layer is social, the software only works because communities create meaning around it.
The #OMN connection is that this is the same lesson for radical media networks. #Indymedia was never only a publishing platform, It was a social path, the technology enabled publishing, but the power came from the culture of open participation, collective editing and local autonomy to build shared responsibility.
The failure of this network was not simply technical, like many commons, the challenge was maintaining the social practices that made the technology meaningful. A reboot cannot just recreate the tools, it has to regrow the conditions that allowed the tools to matter in a world beyond the market logic.
The #dotcons path blindly pushes – create a product, grow users, extract value, centralise control.
The commons model works differently – create relationships, grow trust, share value to distribute power.
This does not mean money disappears from the world. The Rainbow example itself shows this complexity. People still need resources. Food still has to be bought somewhere. The outside economy still exists. The difference is where the organising principle sits. Does money organise the community? Or does the community organise resources?
That is the question that matters, it’s the danger of rebuilding the same common sense system – that many alternative paths fail because they challenge the surface while reproducing the structure underneath. A shiny platform can still become a gatekeeper, a new network can still become centralised. A new media system can still become extractive. The question is not only “Is the technology open?” The question is also “Is the culture open?”
The Rainbow Gatherings survived because they were not trying to build a better marketplace. They were trying to practice another way of organising, that is the deeper #openweb lesson. We do not just need alternative tools, we need alternative relationships with tools. It is about creating spaces where people can trust, participate, maintain and build together.
The #OMN vision is not a replacement platform, it is a garden, the technology is the soil, the people are the gardeners, the commons are what grows.
The biggest question is not whether #AI becomes useful. It is who shapes the surrounding paths? A future controlled by a few #dotcons will reproduce the same mess we have now of centralisation, extraction, enclosure. Were a future built through #4opens paths would look different.
The #geekproblem is believing the next tool solves the old problem. But many problems are not tool problems, they are relationship problems. The next stage is not replacing humans with smarter machines, it is building better human paths that can use machines without becoming dependent on them. Beyond AI is about making communities capable, the real upgrade is not artificial intelligence, it is collective intelligence.
AI is changing the scale of content creation, but not raising the quality. Generative AI tools have lowered the barrier to producing average books, apps, music, legal documents, academic papers and endless streams of text. The result is a massive increase in output, but what happens when production grows faster than our ability to filter, discuss, trust, maintain and give meaning to what is produced?
More books, but more noise, more apps, but more clutter, more papers, but more pressure on systems of review, more music, but a harder struggle to recognise human creativity and care. The #dotcons logic says – more content = more value – were the #openweb lesson is different, value comes from communities, trust, context and care. The challenge is not creating more things, the challenge is building better commons around the things we create.
The AI question is bigger than the technology, as the current wave of generative AI (#GenAI) is presented by our #fashionistas and there servants as inevitable. The message is everywhere to adapt, adopt, integrate, or be left behind. But technology is never neutral, every tool carries assumptions about who benefits, who controls it, what values it embeds and what damage is accepted as the “price of progress”.
From an #OMN perspective, the question is not simply “Can this technology do impressive things?” Of course, it can. The real question is “What kind of society does this technology build?” Does it strengthen human creativity, collective intelligence and open participation? Or does it deepen the existing #dotcons path of centralisation, extraction, dependency and enclosure? This is the wider #openweb question we should be focusing on.
Large language models (#LLM) and generative AI systems represent a real technical development. They can summarise information, translate languages, generate text, assist coding and help people interact with large amounts of information. These are useful capabilities, but the hype jumps from assistance to much larger claims – That AI will replace expertise – That it will solve social problems – That it will transform education and science – That it will create a better future automatically.
The problem is that current AI systems do not understand the world, they generate patterns based on huge amounts of training data. They do not know truth from falsehood, meaning from appearance, or ethics from probability. A convincing answer is not the same thing as understanding.
The missing social layer in our narrow conversations is that the #openweb was built around a different idea, that knowledge comes from people, from communities, discussion, correction, disagreement and shared responsibility. This is where the #geekproblem appears – the tendency to confuse technical capability with social wisdom – the technical question becomes “Can we build it?” the social question “Should we?” often disappears.
A better search algorithm does not automatically create a healthier information system, a faster way to generate content does not automatically create better knowledge. More automation does not automatically create more freedom. The missing piece is the culture around the technology, as technology without social responsibility becomes a tool for whoever already has power.
This is not even touching on that the ecological cost of scale is a catastrophe in the era of #climatechaos and social backdown. The current AI boom depends on enormous infrastructure, huge amounts of electricity, water for cooling, specialised hardware with constant replacement cycles leading to the large-scale resource extraction. At a time of #climatechaos, we should question whether endless expansion is the only possible future. The #dotcons model has always worked through scale, more users, more data, more infrastructure and more dependency. Generative AI is arriving inside the same economic system that created the catastrophic problems it claims to solve.
Then we have the open internet problem, the #openweb was built around participation, people created #4opens websites, communities, documentation, software and culture. GenAI introduces a different path, that the internet becomes raw material, this human creativity becomes training data. Communities produce knowledge, while large companies extract and monetise it. This creates a dangerous cycle were there is less support for creators → less motivation to create → less genuine knowledge → more dependence on generated content. Its #KISS to understand that healthy commons cannot survive if everything is extracted and nothing is returned.
The #Fediverse and the question of growth, a few years ago there was a feeling that the #Fediverse development culture was running on leftovers. Social movements arrived in waves, and many feared that more waves was moving into #mainstreaming. Since then, the Fediverse has grown, with more people knowing about decentralised social media, more organisations paying attention. Ideas that once lived mostly in activist and technical circles have moved closer to wider adoption.
But growth always creates a question – What happens when a movement becomes successful enough that the surrounding culture starts changing it? The early #openweb was built around different assumptions – People have agency – Communities shape their own spaces – Experimentation matters more than optimisation – Trust matters more than control and Commons matter more than platforms. #Mainstreaming brings pressures, these are not automatically bad. But there is a danger that the technology scales while the culture that created it gets diluted. Federation is a technical idea. Living commons is a social one, the challenge remains – now do we grow without losing the roots?
The narrow lesson from #FOSS – it is one of the greatest successes of the #openweb era. Without it there would be no Linux, no Apache, no Firefox, no Wikipedia-scale infrastructure and no Fediverse ecosystem as we know it. It has created extraordinary shared value, but success should not stop us asking difficult questions. The question is not whether FOSS works, the question is – Who does it work for? Where does it struggle? What social lessons can we learn? One recurring problem is the idea that open source is simply a marketplace of independent individuals.
When building the future we actually want – The question is not whether we use AI, more It’s whether we allow the same old #dotcons logic to shape every new technology. The future depends on whether tools strengthen human networks or replace them. Whether they support commons or enclosure, whether they increase agency or dependency.
But what we are seeing is that the tools we need most are often the first things stressed, messy and elitist systems try to defund, discredit and dismantle. Why? Because they require uncertainty, require questioning assumptions, require admitting complexity. Those are not weaknesses, they are survival tools.
A plebiscite (or simple poll) reduces complex questions to binary or multiple-choice outcomes decided by raw headcount. This works reasonably well for large nation-states were aggregating millions of preferences is practically necessary. But in small community groups – like a WhatsApp boating community – it undermines democratic values rather than express them, for several reasons.
The participation fallacy – Whoever happens to be on their phone when the poll appears votes; everyone else is excluded by timing. In a WhatsApp group, this might mean a dozen people determine policy for two hundred. The result carries the appearance of collective legitimacy while actually reflecting a self-selected subset. True democratic representation requires deliberate, structured participation – not whoever checks notifications first.
Suppression of minority interests – This is perhaps the deepest problem. A poll asking “should we allow X at the mooring?” can produce a 60/40 result that completely ignores why the 40% disagree. In a functioning community democracy, minority positions deserve to be heard, reasoned with, and sometimes protected. A simple poll flattens all of that. The liveaboard who depends on a particular mooring has the same one vote as the weekend visitor who barely uses it.
The tyranny of the majority in microcosm – John Stuart Mill’s classic concern about majoritarian democracy – that it can become a form of collective tyranny over individuals – is almost more acute in small groups than in states. In a national election, your minority view is still represented through opposition parties, courts, constitutions. In a WhatsApp poll, you simply lose, with no appeal mechanism, no minority rights protection, and often no transparency about who voted or why.
Social pressure distorts the vote – In a small group, people know each other. Polls are rarely secret. Vocal members who post before the poll closes visibly shift the outcome. Quieter members – often those with the most legitimate concerns – may not vote at all to avoid conflict. The result reflects social dominance as much as genuine preference. A WhatsApp poll in a group like that might ask something like “should we organise a group clean-up on Saturday?” which seems harmless – but even this excludes people who work weekends, who have caring responsibilities, who are moored further out and can’t get there. A poll that produces “yes, 23 votes to 4” then generates social pressure to participate that bears down hardest on the most vulnerable members.
For contentious issues a WhatsApp poll is the worst possible instrument, as itt short-circuits exactly the conversation and negotiation that would surface the real interests at stake. What works better in community groups is face to face or federated trust based deliberative democracy rather than plebiscitary voting. Distinguishing between decisions that affect everyone equally and decisions that affect specific individuals far more than others – the latter should require consent, not just majority approval.
The irony is that small community groups like boating communities are ideal for genuine deliberative democracy – people know each other, stakes are concrete, conversations are possible. WhatsApp polls squander that by importing the bluntest majoritarian tool into a context that could support something richer.
Fluffy mess makeing
A second problem with #dotcons digital community decision-making is the hidden layer underneath the visible conversation: metadata is when organising becomes evidence in court cases.
People think privacy as the content of messages – what someone wrote, what someone posted, what opinion they expressed. But modern platforms collect something much broader: who joined a group, who attended an event, who reacted to a post, who communicated with whom, when people were active, who organised conversations, who supported a campaign, the patterns of relationships and activity.
This information will reveal the structure of a community even without reading the actual conversations. A WhatsApp group, Facebook group, or online community is a map of social relationships. That matters because grassroots organising often happens through relationships. The same online networks that allow communities to defend their rights, challenge poor decisions, or hold powerful actors accountable can also become visible records of who is involved.
The danger appears when, activism turns spiky and there is a conflict between less powerful groups and privileged actors. A campaign group, activist network, neighbourhood organisation, or community project might simply be trying to protect a shared space or challenge unfair treatment. But the digital traces created while organising can later be used against those people.
This does not require some dramatic conspiracy, it happens through ordinary legal processes. A court order can require a platform to provide information relevant to a legal case. Large platforms hold enormous amounts of stored data, and when authorities or private actors successfully obtain legal access, information that people assumed was just part of a conversation can become evidence.
The issue with this is imbalance, a large corporation, wealthy individual, or powerful institution have far more ability to navigate legal systems than a small grassroots group. They have lawyers, resources, and institutional support. Community activists have only their networks and their ability to organise.
This creates a contradiction, the “common sense” digital tools that allow ordinary people to coordinate can also create permanent records of that coordination. The answer is partial – there are #FOSS and #NGO tools that make this less of a problem – Healthy commons needs people to be able to organise, disagree, challenge power, and build alternatives without automatically creating a legal danger to everyone involved.
The question is not whether communities should be accountable, the question is: accountable to whom, and who has the power to use the information? Because in struggles between grassroots groups and privileged actors, metadata can become another form of power.
The lesson is simple – Build open movements, but do not naively confuse openness with exposure. Commons needs trust, but they don’t need to leave a #dotcons surveillance trail. Yes people will use bad tools anyway, but it’s good if some people use better tools to start stepping away from this digital and social mess.
Use the #openweb as core organising, do not use the #dotcons – an example here is open collective website not WhatsApp chat or Google Docs. Tools shape behaver and metadata gets people prosecuted.
Use #signal for chat, it’s not a perfect tool, but it’s better than the rest, use a common platform.
Use #torbrowser for web searches and browsing of any sensitive subject, if you want to use AI, Then don’t logged-in inside tor for any sensitive questions. All AI questions are stored as a part of your account and can be used agonist you – this is true even when you are not logged in.
Do not rely on #AI for activist research or grassroots legal thinking – its hallucinations and training data will endanger you. The AI default is always wrong on this path without inside knowledge to prompt past the #mainstreaming output.
I’ve come to think that caring for people requires a degree of resistance to the culture around us. Not because people are bad, but because so much of the dominant culture is built around values that put profit, status, and competition ahead of human need. In that sense, care becomes a quiet act of rebellion.
The thing about #techbro culture is that some of the most #elitists people grew up loving stories that warned us about the #techshit they are building. They read the dystopias, watched the films, they understood the dangers of unchecked capital, concentrated power, surveillance, artificial intelligence, inequality, and corporate control.
Then many of them decided “Great idea. Let’s build it.” as the #geekproblem made them think they knew better. This is what our #fashionista class call the #tormentnexus problem – the moment when a warning about a future goes wrong becomes interpreted as a blueprint for that future. The issue is not that people like technology, science fiction, fantasy, or engineering. The #openweb itself grew from people who loved exploring what technology could make possible. The problem is when technical possibility becomes separated from social consequence.
A story like Dune is not simply about a powerful individual changing history. It is a warning about charismatic power, messianic thinking, and the danger of believing one person can control complex systems. A story like Snow Crash is not just a cool vision of virtual worlds. It is a satire of corporate fragmentation, private control, and a society where everything becomes a service. A story like Blade Runner is not simply a stylish future aesthetic. It asks what happens when technology creates beings and systems that challenge our ideas of humanity, rights, and exploitation.
But our blinded #mainstreaming started removing the politics from the stories. They kept the shiny machines, they kept the aesthetics, the power fantasies. They discarded the warnings, the #geekproblem is about capability without consequence. A recurring problem in technology culture is that engineering thinking often asks:“Can we build this?” That is an important question, but society has to ask “Should we build this?” And “Who benefits?” And “What happens to the people who have no power in this system?”.
The #geekproblem is not that engineers are bad people. It is the cultural mistake of believing technical problems can be separated from social reality. A better algorithm will not automatically solve inequality, more data will not automatically create wisdom, more automation will not automatically create freedom.
The blinded #geekproblem myth of the chosen builder, is another pattern that appears again and again. The people building these systems imagine themselves as the exception, the story says “Yes, this technology could be dangerous in the wrong hands, but I am different, I will use it responsibly.” This is the same #elitists fantasy that many cautionary stories warn against.
A system can be technically brilliant and socially destructive, the history of technology is full of examples where innovation created new problems alongside the solutions. The factory increased production but created new forms of exploitation, the car increased mobility but reshaped cities around machines. #dotcons social media connected people but also created control, surveillance, manipulation, and attention extraction. The question is never only what technology can do, the question is what kind of society technology grows.
The problem is not bad individuals, though they exist. The problem is social and economic paths that concentrate power and reduce accountability. The danger is not only the evil ruler, more it’s creating structures where rulers become inevitable. This is why the #openweb matters, real power is not finding a better king, it is building #KISS systems where power is distributed, visible, and accountable.
Our current worship of capital rewards the wrong interpretation, is another uncomfortable part of this. The market rewards the most dangerous reading of a story. The cautionary version says “Maybe we should not build this because it creates harm.” The investment version says “Can we build it faster than everyone else?” The version that creates companies, funding rounds, patents, and control is usually the one that wins. The result is that technology is shaped by incentives that favour scale, speed, and ownership. Not care, community, resilience or long-term social health. This is the mess we need to compost to not end up with a world where the same systems criticised in dystopian fiction become business opportunities.
The missing piece is growing the commons, not with anti-technology (the wrong lesson) – The answer is technology embedded in social systems that understand responsibility. This is where the original #openweb ideas matter – growing from open processes, transparent development, shared ownership, community governance and public interest infrastructure. The lesson of #FOSS was never simply “Anyone can copy the code.” The deeper lesson was “People can collectively build and maintain things outside pure market logic.”
It should be obverse that the technical commons will need social commons, without that, open code can still become captured by closed paths. The solution is the challenge for projects like #OMN, #OGB, #4opens, and #indymediaback – not to reject technology – to keep asking a different question not “How do we build the next big thing?” but “How do we build things that help people build together?”
The future does not need more isolated #eletist builders trying to control complexity, it needs communities capable of navigating complexity. The opposite of the #tormentnexus is not rejecting technology, its is more about creating technology where the social relationships come first.
The #openweb was never just about protocols, federation is technical – a commons is social. The work now is making sure we do not build the dystopias our own stories spent decades warning us about. The warning signs are there, the question is whether we listen.
