Tag: elitists

The blocking happens when criticism becomes a substitute for action

There is an important argument within environmentalism that often gets lost between the lifestyle politics of the light greens and the anti-industrial politics of the dark greens. It is humanistic green environmentalism – the idea that ecological sustainability does not require us to abandon technology or progressive modern life. Instead, we need to radically redesign the systems that produce them. Humanistic green thinking is about bringing humanity’s ecological footprint within the limits of the planet while improving the quality of human life.

  • Light green environmentalism turns ecology into a lifestyle choice: buy the right things, recycle, consume less, and make better individual choices.
  • Dark green environmentalism goes further, arguing that ecological destruction is built into industrial capitalism, growth, consumption and production. Technology is treated with suspicion, and dark-green traditions argue for degrowth, radical reductions in consumption, or even a retreat from technological civilisation altogether.

Humanistic environmentalism takes another, balanced path: we need radical systemic change, but technology and design can be part of the solution rather than simply being part of the problem. However, this approach can create another problem: #technocracy.

Technocracy is the idea that complex social problems can be managed through expertise, scientific evidence, measurement, efficiency and technical rationality. In its strongest form, political legitimacy shifts away from popular participation and towards experts who are assumed to know how systems should work.

For humanistic politics, the danger is that we move from collectively changing how society works to experts designing the sustainable society for us. Those are not the same thing. Technocratic thinking is attractive because the problems are genuinely complex. Climate change, energy systems, transport, food production, biodiversity, housing and resource use involve enormous amounts of technical knowledge. Evidence matters. Expertise matters. Science matters.

But science cannot decide our political values for us. Technocracy present political choices as technical problems. Once something has been reduced to a question of efficiency, optimisation, cost-benefit analysis or measurable outcomes, the underlying political arguments can disappear. This creates a real #geekproblem: claims of value-neutrality conceal assumptions about whose interests matter, what counts as prosperity, and what kind of society we actually want.

This is where the needed environmental debate becomes much more interesting. The question isn’t simply – Technology or no technology? It is more, who controls technology, for what purpose, and through what social process?

  • A solar panel can be part of a community energy project, controlled collectively and used to change our lifestyles so that we reduce energy use and learn to live closely with nature. The same technology can be embedded inside a corporate energy system where communities remain passive consumers, with little change to user behaviour or the underlying system.
  • Open-source software can distribute technological power; closed platforms can concentrate it.
  • Electric vehicles can reduce some forms of pollution while still leaving questions about mining, manufacturing, urban design and transport dependency.
  • AI might help optimise energy systems, or it could become another enormous infrastructure of corporate and state control.

Technology itself does not answer these questions. Politics does. This is why the environmental movement needs to avoid both technological utopianism and technological nihilism.

The dark green critique is right to warn that technological efficiency does not, by itself, solve the political economy of endless growth. Efficiency can make consumption cheaper and therefore increase total consumption.

But the humanistic path cannot simply tell billions of people to consume less. That is not a sufficient political programme. People want decent homes, transport, healthcare, communications, food, energy and security. We cannot build a humanistic future by pretending that technological development can simply be switched off.

The missing piece is democratic technological development. We need the tools of humanistic environmentalism without surrendering political agency to technocracy. That means technologies, open standards, open data, open processes and democratic institutions. It means communities can understand, modify and govern, rather than systems that require permanent dependence on technical #elitists. It means treating technology as part of the social commons, rather than assuming that innovation must flow from corporations, governments or specialist institutions down to passive consumers.

The environmental challenge therefore isn’t simply about making capitalism greener. Nor is it about retreating into a fantasy of pre-industrial simplicity. We need to build a different kind of modernity – a modernity where technology reduces ecological damage and increases people’s ability to participate. Human progress is measured not only by efficiency or profitability, but by resilience, autonomy, repairability, accessibility and ecological impact. Where communities can understand and govern the infrastructures on which they depend. And where experts are valued for what they know without being allowed to become a substitute for democracy.

This is the point where humanistic environmentalism needs to meet the #openweb, #FOSS, the commons and grassroots organisation. The choice is not technology vs nature, nor experts vs ordinary people. The challenge is to grow social systems where knowledge, technology and democratic participation reinforce each other.

We don’t need less thinking, we need more people able to think, participate, organise and understand the systems shaping their lives. That is the difference between a technological future imposed from above and a technological future built as commons from below – using the best tools we have to build a society that is more ecological, more democratic and more capable of changing itself.

The #blocking of this is not that people disagree, challenge and disagreement are necessary, the blocking happens when criticism becomes a substitute for action.

Demanding proof before engaging with the alternative.
“What have you done?” can be a useful question, but it also becomes a way of putting the person making the challenge permanently on trial. The response then becomes about defending credentials rather than building the alternative.

Reducing action to individual performance.
“What have you done today?” is reproducing the very #stupidindividualism being criticised. The important question is not what heroic thing did one person do? But what are we building collectively?

Moving the conversation onto legality or uncertainty.
“The answer may not be strictly legal” and “Not sure…” don’t engage with the central question: how do we move communities away from the #dotcons? They redirect the conversation away from the structural challenge.

Treating posting as either everything or nothing.
The question is whether communication is leading somewhere. A post that recruits people into an open project is different from another argument that generates clicks for Facebook.

Confusing criticism with change.
“I try to subvert the acolytes of the status quo every day” sounds active, but the important follow-up is: what does that produce? Does it build a relationship, an organisation, a tool, a migration, a community or an alternative infrastructure?

The “positive alternatives” argument also become blocking.
“Just make positive posts about projects” sounds constructive, but if it means don’t criticise the existing system, it becomes a form of depoliticisation. People need to understand what is wrong, why it is wrong, and what they can actually do instead.

The useful distinction is: Criticism → understanding → organisation → action → alternative. Blocking looks more like: Criticism → argument → personal challenge → argument → more criticism. That is the #block.

The #dotcons argument is strongest when the hashtag isn’t treated as an answer in itself. #dotcons names the problem. #openweb names part of the alternative. #OMN is an attempt to build infrastructure for that alternative. The missing middle is the community that connects the three.

So the question “What have you done today?” is potentially powerful, but it should mean – What have we done together today that makes the alternative more real? That shifts the conversation away from individual virtue and towards collective agency. And that connects directly to the compost metaphor: don’t spend all day arguing about how bad the pile of mess is. Grab a spade, organise some people, and start turning it into something useful.

#BrightGreen #Environmentalism #Technocracy #ClimateChaos #OpenWeb #FOSS #Commons #Democracy #Technology #Ecology #Sustainability #OpenSource #Degrowth

When Technologists Forget the Warning

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, , 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.

Rebuilding Shared Meaning in a Fragmented World

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 was about 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 path. 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 failing social democratic institutions lost legitimacy, narratives stopped convincing people. Governments increasingly rejected planning and handed decision-making to markets. Globalisation connected everything while making almost nothing feel controllable. Information mess exploded beyond individual’s capacity to understand any of it.

Instead of thoughtful maps, we had endless competing realities. Then, the #deathcult, 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 all political agency. We became slaves focused on choosing between products while unable to shape the systems that govern our lives.

This is where contemporary politics becomes difficult to understand if we keep trying to use any grounded categories – 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 still 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 to often leads to oppressive. With the ending of modernity:

  • 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 mess 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 paths beyond this deadlock – not returning to centralised authority or surrender to endless relativism, but rebuilding shared processes that hold diversity without demanding conformity.

This is where projects like the #Fediverse, #OMN, and the 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 creating 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.