enclosure – #OMN (Open Media Network)

“#Oxfordboaters – Some of the people have to lie to themselves as they blindly believe in private property and rule of law but squat on private property and brack the law by not moving. They try and pretend this is not true, if they do this pretending to strongly they will make us all homeless.”

A lot of people are up shit creek without a paddle, yet keep looking in the same places that got them there. On this apathy and laissez-faire “common sense”, we have a real problem, decades of #stupidindividualism have left people expecting things to somehow fix themselves while collective capacity withers. The answer isn’t wishing people were different, it’s building structures, cultures, and tools that reflect challenging take this reality.

There’s plenty of room for creativity in that work. So how do we start to compost this mess of people ending up trapped in this contradiction. To recap, they profess a strong belief in private property and the rule of law, yet in practice they occupy private property and rely on not being moved on. To avoid facing this contradiction, they tell themselves stories that make the contradiction disappear.

The problem is that reality doesn’t go away just because we refuse to look at it. The more tightly people cling to these comforting narratives, the harder it becomes to deal with the actual situation. And if they cling too hard, they risk creating outcomes that harm everyone, including making all us #Oxfordboaters homeless.

Yes, these stories can hold things together for a while, but when events threaten to sweep them away, the contradictions are exposed. What looked like certainty is revealed as wishful thinking, and people are left paralysed by indecision, unable to act because the assumptions they depended on no longer fit the world in front of them.

We can’t do much about the hardened #fluffy crowd – so committed to comfort and respectability that no amount of evidence will shift them toward meaningful action. That is a real limit, and it’s worth being honest about it rather than wasting energy trying to convert the unconvertible.

But the hardened fluffy crowd is not the main problem. The more urgent challenge is the vast non-action bloc: the enormous number of people who are not hostile to change, not ideologically committed to the status quo, but who have simply stopped believing that collective action is possible, meaningful, or worth the cost. The culture of resignation that surrounds this bloc is one of the most significant political #blocks of our times.

This mess is almost entirely manufactured, so how is this resignation made, it’s not because people are stupid, but more that decades of #neoliberalism have done systematic work on how people understand themselves and each other. Isolation has been normalised. Cynicism has been marketed as sophistication. #stupidindividualism – the belief that you are fundamentally alone, that your choices are personal rather than political, that the market is more real than the community – has been embedded so deeply that it feels like common sense.

People are taught to see themselves as consumers, not citizens, as individuals navigating a system, not as communities capable of changing one. That teaching is not accidental as an atomised population is a manageable population. Resignation is not a natural response to difficult circumstances, it is a political outcome, produced and maintained by specific interests.

On coalitions? Some people argue we need to “build coalitions” with everyone – that the task is to be broad, inclusive, and endlessly accommodating. That pink haired instinct comes from a good place, but a coalition is not built by enabling anti-social behaviour, learned helplessness, or endless doom-scrolling. A coalition is not a waiting room where everyone gets to stay comfortable while somebody else does the work. A coalition needs people willing to act together – the only meaningful definition. Broadness is a means, not an end. A movement that is wide but paralysed is not a movement, it is a demographic.

These are two retreats that serve the same master – the real problem is not disagreement between people who want change, as disagreement is healthy and productive. The problem is the shared belief – held across otherwise very different political tendencies – that nothing can fundamentally change, or that someone else should be the one to change it. This belief takes two main forms, and both are dead ends.

#toxicIdealism retreats into fantasies of purity – waiting for the perfect conditions, the perfect movement, the perfect analysis before acting. It mistakes the map for the territory, the theory for the practice, the vision for the work. It can look like radicalism while functioning as paralysis.

Mindless cynicism retreats in the opposite direction – into excuses for inaction dressed as realism. Nothing works, nothing changes, everyone is corrupt, the system always wins. It can look like hard-headedness while functioning as surrender. Both #toxicIdealism and cynicism leave existing power entirely untouched. They are, in that sense, two faces of the same capitulation.

There is nothing in toxic idealism or mindless cynicism except fuel for the status quo, one retreats into fantasies of purity, the other into excuses for inaction, both leave existing power untouched. The actual task

The path is not hate of the people who have been shaped by these cultures, or contempt for the resigned, the cynical, or the burned-out as this is both morally wrong and politically stupid – it deepens the isolation it claims to criticise. The people inside the non-action bloc are not enemies. They are, in most cases, people who have been failed by every institution that was supposed to give them a reason to act.

The task is to challenge the culture that keeps people powerless., to offer, concretely and practically, experiences of collective action that work – that produce real results, relationships, and evidence that things can be different. Not rhetoric about possibility, but demonstrations of it. Free people from isolation, show them they are not alone, that their situation is shared, that shared situations have shared solutions. Free people from cynicism – not by arguing against it, but by making it empirically wrong. Rebuild collective action, not as an ideal but as a practice: small, visible, cumulative, and real.

The #enclosure we are pushing back against is not only economic or digital, it is the enclosure of imagination – the slow fencing-off of the belief that collective life is possible at all. Reclaiming the commons begins with reclaiming the conviction that there are a commons to reclaim. That is political work, and it starts with the person in front of you.

#OMN #fluffy #neoliberalism #stupidindividualism #toxicIdealism #enclosure #commons #activism #collectiveaction #openweb

#Nicenasty the hidden power of soft obstruction

“Working groups (#WG) have one job – get things done, they don’t need permission for every step – they need to report openly, consult when it affects others, and hand back decisions that are too big for them to own alone. That’s it, that’s the whole structure.”

The story is simple once you stop looking at the green branding and start looking at social power. A powerless tenant farmer in the Cairngorms watches land his family has worked for generations sell for ten times what it was worth only a few years ago. Not because farming suddenly became more valuable, but because carbon became a speculative asset. A corporation somewhere needs a green badge, farm land becomes the badge, our agriculture disappearing becomes the cost. This is not a “mistake”, its normal, this is the “common sense” system working as designed. #ClimateChaos under capitalism becomes another market opportunity, another asset class, another enclosure of the commons.

The mechanism of the #Carboncon, a corporation that has power can carry on almost exactly as before climate change became an issue: same factories, same flights, same extraction, same emissions, same growth ideology. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants trees on it, and announces to the world that it is now “carbon neutral.” If it wants more PR sparkle, it calls itself “carbon negative.” Nothing fundamental changes. The emissions are still happening, extraction is still happening, the destruction is still happening.

What changes is the accounting story, a piece of land somewhere else is converted into a tradable abstraction that launders the corporation’s image while allowing business-as-usual to continue. This is the logic of #neoliberalism applied to ecology – if there is a crisis, turn the crisis into a market. Our glaring current example of this is BrewDog and its greenwashing cycle, #BrewDog becomes a perfect illustration of the mess, in 2020 the company bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, partly funded through public grants, promising millions of trees and “carbon negative” operations.

Then reality hit a large number of trees died, peat disturbance has released stored carbon, regulators ruled the carbon-negative advertising misleading, the branding quietly disappeared, and the estate was later sold into the carbon-offset market. Public money in, #PR campaign launched, trees dead, farmer displaced, badge worn, land commodified and Carbon credits traded – Business continues as normal, round and round the #deathcult spins.

This should sound historically familiar: The Highland Clearances never really ended, the justification changed. Then it was sheep, now it is carbon. Communities are again being displaced by distant capital as land is consolidated into investment portfolios instead of living local economies. The mess is productive mixed-use landscapes are transformed into speculative ecological assets managed for investors, corporations, and global finance.

This is enclosure updated for the era of #climatechaos. Around half of Scottish estate sales in recent years have gone to investment funds, corporations, and large trusts rather than people intending to actually live on and work the land. At the same time local communities are priced out, young farmers are locked out, food production declines, rural life becomes hollowed out, and decision-making moves further away from the people directly affected.

The language changes, the extraction remains the same, the deeper problem is that people still expect the systems causing the crisis to somehow solve the crisis. But capitalism does not solve crises, it monetises them – when pollution becomes profitable, pollution markets appear, when climate collapses, carbon markets appear, when social breakdown accelerates, surveillance markets appear, when loneliness spreads, platform monopolies appear. The system feeds on crisis because crisis creates new opportunities for extraction #KISS.

This is why the #mainstreaming obsession with “green growth” is ideological theatre, infinite growth on a finite planet was always insane, adding green branding does not make it sane in any way. The carbon market does not reduce emissions, it redistributes responsibility while preserving existing power structures. The food grown by local farmers is real, the communities rooted in landscapes are real, the accumulated ecological knowledge is real. The carbon spreadsheet is an abstraction traded by financial actors who have little or no connection to the land itself.

This is where projects like #OMN matter, its path is about rebuilding the social infrastructure needed for collective action outside the control of #dotcons, PR agencies, NGOs, and corporate gatekeepers. Because right now, the stories people hear are shaped by institutions whose survival depends on preserving the existing system. The corporation has a marketing department, the local people usually does not, so the lies travel faster than the truth.

The #openweb matters because communities need their own media infrastructure to organise, communicate, document to resist enclosure in all its modern forms. Without this, even resistance becomes mediated through controlling paths designed to neutralise it. A society built on commodification will commodify nature, society built on extraction will extract from ecological collapse itself, society built on #stupidindividualism will struggle to defend commons and collective life in any meaningful way. This is why we need to become the change and challenge, not through current common sense purity politics, not through #fashionista performative consumerism, and definitely not through corporate-approved and funded activism.

But through rebuilding #OMN commons-based culture and infrastructure from the ground up, by compost not branding – our tools are shovels, not greenwashed investment portfolios. The future depends on whether we keep feeding the #deathcult or start growing alternatives.