A lot of our current mess can be understood through the long transition from #modernism to #postmodernism. Not as an academic debate, but as a lived reality.
Modernity believed in progress. It believed that society could be understood, improved, and consciously shaped. Science, democracy, planning, industry, public institutions, trade unions, education, and infrastructure were all part of this story. The future was something people could build together.
Of course, this vision was never as simple or as benign as some people imagined. Modernity produced extraordinary advances in health, communication, and material abundance. It also produced colonialism, industrial warfare, bureaucracy, environmental destruction, and systems of control on a scale previously unimaginable. Yet despite its contradictions, modernity had confidence. It assumed that problems could be solved, that collective action mattered.
Then came the invisible #postmodern turn. The institutions lost legitimacy, narratives stopped convincing people. Governments increasingly gave up planning and handed decision-making to markets. Globalisation connected everything while making almost nothing feel controllable. Information exploded beyond any individual’s capacity to understand it.
Instead of thoughtful maps, we had endless competing realities. Then we had the promise of #neoliberalism, that deregulated markets and individual freedom would create the best possible outcomes. In practice, much of what happened was the dismantling of collective institutions without replacing them with anything capable of holding society together. People gained consumer “choice” while losing political agency. We became slaves to choosing between products while unable to shape the systems that govern our lives.
This is where much contemporary politics becomes difficult to understand if we keep trying to use grounded categories. This mess increased the conflict between people trying to rebuild collective meaning and people retreating into fragments – Some fragments become consumer identities, some become nationalisms. In alt culture we lived through a decade of conspiracy theories while the #mainstreaming become lifestyle brands.
The common thread is that people are looking for belonging in a world that increasingly feels impossible to influence. This is why so much contemporary politics is irrational. People are not responding to facts, they are responding to the crisis of meaning. A crisis of trust, a crisis of belonging.
Modernism reminds us that collective action matters, that process we build matter’s, DIY infrastructure matters and finally that society can be consciously shaped. Were #Postmodernism at its best reminds us that dogmatic system contains blind spots. That power hides itself behind claims of objectivity. That diversity of experience matters, thus blinded certainty becomes oppressive on this current path:
- We lost confidence in human planning but kept bureaucracy.
- We lost collective power but kept #elitists concentrations of power.
- We gained diversity of voices but lost shared language.
- We gained infotainment but lost trust.
This leaves us trapped in blinded deadens of certainties of yesterday and the endless fragmentation of today. The challenge for projects like the #openweb is finding a path beyond this deadlock of not returning to centralised authority or surrender to endless relativism. But the rebuilding of shared processes that hold diversity without demanding conformity.
This is where projects like the #Fediverse, #OMN, and the #4opens matter. Their value is not primarily technical, their value is social. They are historical lived experiments in creating spaces where cooperation emerges without central control. Where differences coexist without immediate fragmentation and where communities develop shared infrastructure without surrendering autonomy.
The #KISS task is to create conditions where many narratives can coexist while still allowing collective action. That is harder than either modern certainty or postmodern scepticism. But it is the path through the era of #climatechaos, #dotcons platform monopolies, social fragmentation, and democratic decline.
Power is built, not granted – Power comes from power – it is something people build, organise, and create together. In the best outcomes, power is shared and circulated. But it is rarely something simply handed down from above. A lot of modern political thinking still struggles with this. It imagines power as something that belongs to institutions, leaders, owners, or authorities – something granted through permission.
But historically, power has always been created through collective action. Private property is one example of a social agreement backed by power. The myth is that ownership is a natural thing that existed forever. The reality is that ownership systems are historical arrangements, enforced through social structures.
The old story is simple – Someone draws a line in the sand, they say “Everything on this side is mine.” The group accepts that boundary – or someone has enough force to make them accept it.
That model of power still shapes much of our world, but notice, this is not the foundation of the #Fediverse. The #Fediverse is built on a different assumption, it is based on an open flowing social web of connection rather than enclosure, participation rather than ownership, federation rather than domination and shared infrastructure rather than a single centre.
The lines in the sand are not permanent walls, they move, they adapt, they blow in the wind. That does not mean there is no power. It means power works differently. The challenge is that many people approach the #Fediverse using old assumptions from the #closedweb of who owns it? Who controls it? Who is the authority? Who gives permission? Those questions make sense in a platform economy, they make less sense in a living commons.
This is where some of the current liberal tradition has become confused, as liberalism at its best gave us important ideas of individual rights, freedom of thought, limits on arbitrary power and space for difference. But much of the current political culture has absorbed the logic of the #deathcult: neoliberalism, market absolutism, and a fragmented postmodern culture where everything becomes identity, performance, and competition.
The result is a strange contradiction of a culture that talks endlessly about freedom while creating systems that reduce collective freedom, that celebrates choice while making real alternatives harder to build, that protects individual expression while weakening the shared social foundations needed for that expression to matter. The question is not how we return to some imaginary past.
The question is then how do we build new forms of collective power that fit the world we actually live in? This is the unfinished work of the #openweb. We need constructive thinking beyond “common sense” because much of what is called common sense is simply the habit of old systems.
Technology shapes society, the design of our networks shapes how we relate – Closed systems create dependency – Open systems create possibility. But openness alone is not enough, we need the social practices around openness of trust, care, stewardship, accountability and collective imagination.
The future will not be given to us by institutions, it will be built by people creating alternatives and connecting them together. Power is not permission, power is participation.