We need an honest conversation

The current generation of activism is crap – fragmented, self-referential, lost in identity wrangles, #NGO capture, and #fashionista online posturing. What can be learned:

Affinity and Trust > Bureaucracy and Branding

The 1990s/2000s alter-globalization movement and early #Indymedia weren’t “organisations,” they were ecosystems. Small affinity groups moved fast, trusted each other, and shared infrastructure without needing a brand deck or a funder’s approval. Lesson we can learn: build movements through trust, not paperwork. Organising should be messy but alive, not tidy and dead.

Media as Commons > Media as Market

#Indymedia: it was open “trust” based publishing, anyone could access, and no corporate ad trackers attached. Compare this to today’s #NGO “campaign media” or endless Twitter/X outrage cycles: closed, shallow, fleeting. What lessons can we learn: if you don’t own your media, you don’t own your message. The #OMN and #4opens try to restore this, we need grassroots media infrastructure, not another silo.

Direct Action > Endless Process

From anti-roads to climate camps, action mattered more than Zoom calls or social media petitions. Protest camps, blockades, squats: they disrupted the system physically, not just discursively. Lesson from this is got off the timeline. Occupy space, take risks, make it visible. Without action, all the online noise is just background music to the #deathcult.

Messy Coalitions > Purity Politics

Earlier waves brought anarchists, trade unionists, students, farmers, hackers, and faith groups into loose alliances. Today, movements too often fragment into micro-identities that cannot scale. The lesson: you don’t need to agree on everything, you just need a shared enemy and a common tactic. #KISS.

Culture Matters

Camps and protests weren’t just strategy meetings, they were lived experiments with free kitchens, pirate radio, temporary autonomous zones. Joy and play sustained the struggle. What we can learn? Activism that feels like homework will burn out. Activism that feels like life will endure.

What, can we learn from this? The current generation must relearn: activism is not a brand you attach yourself to, it’s a practice of building collective power. You don’t need permission, you don’t need a platform, you don’t need an #NGO to bless you. You need each other, and tools you can trust.

That’s the rebooting of the #openweb and the #OMN path. Compost the crap. Pick up the shovels. Plant again. To take this path seriously, we need to remember a little history. In 1933, German conservatives thought they could “manage” Hitler. Two years later, they were being shot in their own homes.

Q. is there any time in history where fascists were voted into power and then peacefully voted out? The answer is brutal. Not once. Ever.

Everyone thinks they know Germany’s story. Von Papen said, “We’ve hired him.” Within 18 months, his allies were corpses. The clever men who thought they could tame the beast were either dead, exiled, or crawling for survival.

Italy? Worse. The king could have crushed Mussolini’s blackshirts in an afternoon. Instead, he handed him the keys. Twenty years later: mass graves, partisans hanging Mussolini upside down like rotten meat.

Spain? A bloodbath. Franco staged a coup, the “democracies” wrung their hands, and fascism ruled for 39 years. He died comfortably in his bed. His victims are still being dug up in 2025.

Hungary? Orbán walked in through the ballot box in 2010. Within three years he controlled the media, the courts, the state. Fourteen years later, the EU is still “deeply concerned” while Hungary is a one-party state.

The only clean win? Finland 1932 – fascists jumped too soon, tried a coup before winning elections, and the army crushed them. That’s it. One time in a century.

The pattern is obvious:

Conservatives panic about socialism.

They ally with fascists as the “lesser evil.”

Fascists seize power.

Fascists immediately purge the conservatives.

Then you get 30–50 years of dictatorship, and mountains of corpses.

How many times did conservatives actually control the fascists they backed? Zero.
How many times did the fascists purge them once in power? Every single time.

A. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: violence works for fascists. They smash their enemies while whining they’re victims. They sow chaos, then impose “order.” Meanwhile, democrats write editorials, pass resolutions, and file lawsuits – while the fascists laugh and consolidate power.

The numbers don’t lie:

Fascists removed peacefully after winning elections: 0

Average length of fascist rule: 31 years

Removed by voting: 0

Removed by asking nicely: 0

Removed by war or coups: almost all of them

The historical record gives us three choices:

Stop them before they take power.

War.

Wait for them to die.

We missed the first. The window’s not closing – it’s closed.

And this is where the truth bites: fascism isn’t some freak accident. It’s not “outside” the system. It’s the sharpest edge of the #deathcult – the same system that sells endless growth on a dying planet, that privatizes solidarity, that mainstreams cruelty while smiling about “freedom.” Fascism is not an exception, it’s the rule, 40 years of #mainstreaming is now trying to enforce as the mask slips.

If history teaches us anything, it’s this: the centre will always betray, the right will always unleash fascism, and the people will always be left to dig up the bodies.

Please take note of the working activism at the start of this article. You can support and take part https://opencollective.com/open-media-network and https://unite.openworlds.info/ are entry points, there are likely more post them in the comments.

Pushing the #deathcult: “Respect for the rule of law is a must for all EU funding”

The intended consequence of that EU budget framing is to sound like “law, rights, stability” – but the (un)intended (and very real) consequence is to strangle the roots of protest, dissent, and grassroots organising we need to move way from the current mess. Here’s why it’s a problem for protest, which is the foundation of any meaningful liberal democracy path:

Rule of law vs. rule of order: These budget “safeguards” don’t distinguish between authoritarian crackdowns and legitimate acts of civil disobedience. If a protest camp, blockade, or media collective gets painted as “breaking the law,” EU funding mechanisms can be used to cut support, stigmatise, and silence them.

Weaponising legality: Movements that we need to challenge “captured” state and corporate interests always end up criminalised – not because they are wrong, but because they are inconvenient. Think of climate activists fined for blocking pipelines, migrants criminalised for crossing borders, journalists harassed for exposing corruption. With this EU framework, the act of being in dissent will be turned into grounds for exclusion.

Civil society narrowed: The EU says it wants to “support civil society” – but only the kinds of #NGOs and associations that worship the same #deathcult: professionalised, polished, grant-dependent. Grassroots networks, messy and spiky as they are, don’t fit. They’re starved out, left unfunded, delegitimised.

On the surface this image seems sensible, lift the lid, and it’s only a desperate and pointless shield for #Deathcult stability. Behind all this is the push to preserve the stability of a collapsing order – the long dead and blinded #neoliberal economics, fortress borders, fossil infrastructure. “Democracy, security, and economic stability” is code for maintaining the #deathcult status quo, no matter how much it rots the roots of any real democracy. So yes, this is exactly the kind of shit we need to compost, break it down, expose the rot, turn the shiny “rule of law” path into humus for the real path of the commons, of protest, of collective resistance.

A good start is to move to prosecute the people pushing this “law and order” agenda #KISS

#4opens Poem

Open data!
Show the rot, spread the truth!

Open source!
Build it free, build it loose!

Open process!
No closed doors, more voices in!

Open standards!
Solidarity – we rise, we win!

We compost their broken paths,
we grow wild flowers in the cracks,
flowers of democracy, of freedom!

#KISS

The stubborn few who show up with shovels, laptops, and trust

In the tech world of social change and challenge, we’re living with a strange imbalance. Too often, the spaces we use and try and build are crowded with useless, self-destructive prats – people more interested in ego, control, and clout than in making anything grow from the roots. And when they do very rearly act, their “help” is often poison: it blocks, slows, and derails.

At the same time, the number of people doing truly useful, collective, grounded work feels small. You can see this in every grassroots project, tech or activism, whether it’s, coding radical #FOSS projects, building alternative media, running servers, or planting food forests. The people who actually show up and keep things moving are always fewer than we need.

Then into this gap steps the parasites of #mainstreaming. Yes, they look like they’re helping. They reach out, they polish up the image, they “outreach” grassroots tech projects to wider audiences. But under the surface, this isn’t really helping. What they are doing, shifts focus away from what makes grassroots powerful – trust, messy collectives, stubborn autonomy – and towards something glossy and hollow.

Real help doesn’t come from smoothing out the rough edges for palatability. Real help is messy, reciprocal, and based in care. It’s, shipping working code, turning up to maintain the server, to keep the firewood dry, to cook food for the meeting, to argue about governance without walking away. It’s staying rooted when everything pulls you towards the easy path of compromise.

The good news? The work that does happen, when it’s done by those few stubborn and lovely souls who commit to it, is real and lasting. Every #fediverse instance that survives another year, every scrappy #openweb tool that stays online, every cooperative that resists collapse – these are proof that grassroots power is alive.

So yes, most of what gets labelled as “help” from outside is damage. But the grassroots path is still there. If we keep it simple – #KISS – and keep choosing trust over polish, collectives over branding, we can tip the balance back to where it needs to be.

Let’s look at some examples:

#Indymedia worked because it was built on trust, open publishing, and direct participation. But once the dogmatic #eekproblem, the NGOs and professional activists came sniffing, the energy shifted. Gradely the rough edges, the wild openness, became a “problem to be managed” instead of a strength. And with that, the vitality drained.

Or look at the #Fediverse. It thrives when it stays scrappy, with collectives running their own servers and shaping their own cultures. But already we see #Bluesky, #Threads, and NGO-backed “Fediverse Foundations” pushing. They’ll say they’re amplifying the movement. In reality, they’re clipping its wings, taming it for the same #mainstreaming logic that gutted Indymedia.

The #OMN (Open Media Network) was always an attempt to resist this drift. Instead of begging for a seat at the mainstream table, it builds trust networks from the ground up. No gatekeeping, no branding games – just collectives #4opens sharing content, tools, and governance in open, federated ways. It’s not sexy. It doesn’t polish well for a TED talk. But it works, because it stays close to where publishing and power actually happen: at the grassroots.

I’ve seen this first-hand in my own work. On the boats at Rummelsburger Bucht, in affinity groups fighting #climatechaos, and in rebuilding #indymediaback, the same pattern repeats. The parasite #mainstreaming arrive smiling, but what matters is the stubborn few who show up with shovels, laptops, and trust. Those are the people who keep the fire burning. The #KISS truth, it doesn’t take everyone. It just takes enough of us who refuse to give in.

While it’s easy (and justified) to call out the parasitic #mainstreaming types, it’s harder (and more important) to think about how to bridge to them without being captured or co-opted.

1. Meet them on fluffy values, not hard projects. Most #mainstreaming people say they care about openness, creativity, and inclusion. Use those as starting points. Instead of hitting them with #4opens or #OGB right away, talk in simple, human terms: trust, care, mutual aid, freedom. Then show how the OMN already embodies those values with examples like: When talking about #indymedia reboot, don’t begin with federation protocols; begin with “this is a people’s newswire where communities publish, and no single organisation can control it.” Then connect that to the tech.

2. Frame the commons as abundance, not scarcity. Mainstreaming comes with a scarcity mindset (“we need funding,” “we need gatekeepers”). We counter with an abundance story: the #openweb grows by sharing, remixing, and federating. Emphasise that our strength isn’t owning the pie but baking more pies together. An example might be: OMN flows content between blogs, small sites, and #fediverse projects. This isn’t competing with “platforms,” it’s weaving a bigger web where everyone benefits.

3. Offer them low-stakes ways to join. Not everyone is ready to dive headfirst into spiky, fluffy, grassroots culture. Make lightweight on-ramps: federated publishing plugins, easy “flows not silos” demos, or spaces where they can share without having to fully sign up.

4. Keep the tone sometimes fluffy, sometimes spiky. People new to grassroots tech often get scared off by the first bit of conflict. Fluffy spaces – campfires, storytelling, art – can bring them in. The spiky edges – calling out parasitism, blocking #NGO capture – should remain, but not be the only door in.

5. Make co-creation visible. Show them that grassroots projects don’t just “talk” about collaboration – we live it. When people see decision-making without bosses, publishing without gatekeepers, and coding without silos, they realise it’s possible. An example of this can be found in #OMN wiki pages on Unite Forge which are messy, open, and collective. That’s not a bug, it’s a living record of co-creation. Point to that messiness as proof of trust-based work that they can make more “tidy”, this is work as gift.

The #bridgeing isn’t about diluting grassroots culture into “NGO-speak.” It’s about keeping our paths, our politics sharp, while offering ways for curious people to join with less fear. Some will drop off (parasites always will), but others might step over the bridge and become part of the messy, hopeful commons.

#KISS

Individualism vs Commons: Why the Fediverse matters, and the Indieweb is legacy

The continuing, talking to legacy alt media people, sparks off clarification. The current conversation comes from the #indieweb, rooted in individualism, the digital mirror of the lone artisan, the self-sufficient homesteader, the coder as sovereign subject. This is not a critique in itself – individualism is a core driver of creativity and experimentation. But taken as the centre of gravity, it is a politics that naturally aligns with capitalism. Each person builds their site, their stack, their micro-brand, carving out a niche within the wider marketplace of attention.

By contrast, the Fediverse is – at least in practice – a commons-based approach. It is messy, communal, and often contradictory. The culture tells a white lie about being for individual empowerment (“host your own instance, be free!”) but the reality is that the Fediverse only exists because of shared infrastructure, federated protocols, and overlapping communities of care. It is not about individuals building perfect silos, it is about rough collective spaces and imperfect federation.

This makes the Fediverse a bad fit for capitalism, which is precisely its virtue. While corporations circle like vultures trying to find a monetization model, they repeatedly stumble over the fact that the Fediverse runs on gift economies, volunteer admin work, and political commitments to #4opens data. It resists enclosure, because enclosure breaks the very thing people come for: the federation of flows.

Politics is in the protocols, so much of this comes down to unspoken politics. The indieweb protocols and culture fit comfortably with #neoliberal individualism: “build your own, control your data, be an island.” The Fediverse protocols and culture emerge from anarchist, commons-oriented traditions: “connect, federate, share, fight (mainstreaming) spam together.”

Both are #openweb native, both valuable in their own way. But only one – the Fediverse – has proven capable of scaling into an actual social movement. It is not a coincidence that working activist traditions, mutual aid groups, and alternative media collectives gravitate toward federation rather than individual silos.

Silo vs Flow. Legacy media, and many who imitate it, still think in silo terms – bounded publications, paywalls, gated submissions. They mirror the scarcity logic of print capitalism. The #openweb, on the other hand, is about flow – federation, remix, sharing, building commons. The Fediverse works because it embodies this. The #Indieweb stalls when it forgets this.

The problem we now face is that almost all of the current “leadership” both technical and social of the fedivers is pushing blinded #mainstreaming, its good that some one is doing this, dont take this wrong, but we need balence. And this is why the #OMN path matters, the Open Media Network is the logical next native step: federation all the way down, a refusal to compromise with silo logic, and a clear embrace of the commons. Instead of curating content behind walls, we curate flows in open space. Instead of asking permission, we build bridges.

The need for balence is clear: push more individualist silos – a safe fit for capitalism, but doomed to irrelevance. Or embrace federated flows – messy, communal, unprofitable, and alive. The #openweb is at this crossroads. If we do not push the commons-first path, the vultures of #mainstreaming will enclose the #Fediverse just as they did the early web. This is why we need the native #OMN path, not as a brand, but as a living commitment: federation, commons, openness, and collective care. This is not just about tech, it’s about politics. About simple #KISS whether the future of the web belongs to capital, or to the commons. And the problem we need to compost is that common sense tells us to take the wrong path.

Looking at working with legacy media thinking – silo vs flow

Looking at working with legacy media thinking – silo vs flow

Every so often I answer the out reach calls from more traditional alt/progressive media orgs, let’s look at some of the very illustrative “common sense” knock backs. The recent examples are Freedom’s reaction and Good Internet’s submission call – As their reaction is useful to illustrate the fault line of “radical publishing” in a federated media path.

Here’s a sketch of how it can (and arguably should) work if we’re serious about, #openweb, and soft-communing infrastructure:

Radical publishing vs content marketing

Linking, promiscuous citation, and remixing are not “self-promotion,” they are the currency of commons media. The #deathcult “common sense” (silo good, linking bad) flips this into “spam” because it serves enclosure. A federated media path re-asserts: to link is to share; the work which is often missing is to normalize this against the #geekproblem hostility.

Federated magazine model

Think of Good Internet or Freedom not as final silos but as temporary, themed hubs: Each issue/edition is an editorial filter over the wider #datasoup. Every piece lives in at least two places: Original home (blog, Fediverse post, OMN node, site). Curated home (magazine issue, zine, aggregator). Citation = federation: linking outward is a feature, not a weakness.

Protocols over Silos

ActivityPub / OMN: an article = Note or Article with links, tags, signatures. Bridging: same content can be pulled into Good Internet’s site, Freedom, an OMN feed, or a #p2p archive. Editorial collectives act as curators, not gatekeepers: they federate, contextualize, and remix.

Radical editorial practice

News vs. Narrative: anarchist/left publishers still to often mimic #mainstreaming news style. But radical publishing can foreground process stories (assemblies, conflicts, federations, mistakes) as valuable. The “native common sense” is that embedded links aren’t a vice; they’re a form of solidarity economy. Columns / paths: rather than stand-alone “takes,” recurring voices build a long-form conversation thread across issues.

Overcoming the spam accusation

Transparency: declare openly, “this piece first appeared on hamishcampbell.com – we federate because knowledge is commons.” Reciprocity: every time you link out, you also lift other projects, so the “flow” is visible. Editorial notes: curators can preface with: “We include links because they build the #openweb – federation isn’t promotion, it’s solidarity.”

Practical workflow (2026-ish)

Write a blog/site piece on your own, or community domain (independent anchor). Publish simultaneously to Fediverse (AP Article). Flag it with #OMN metadata (topic, source, tags). Editorial collectives subscribe to flows/feeds – curate into magazine/zine/weekly digest. Federation tools track lineage: where did this piece appear, when, how remixed. Readers move from curated hubs back to source domains (and sideways to other linked nodes).

Why it matters to anarchists

Free software is political; so is free publishing. Federation prevents capture by the #nastyfew – no central owner can throttle which radical voices appear. Linking promiscuously creates a mutual aid economy of attention, the opposite of platform/silo enclosure. Each zine/collective/magazine is an affinity group node; federation = council of nodes. It encodes horizontalism in media.

So when you bump against “not news enough” or “too self-promotional,” that’s the clash between #mainstreaming editorial common sense and federated radical publishing practice. One assumes scarcity (guard the pages); the other assumes abundance (share the flow).

We do need to compost some of this mess #KISS

Let’s build the shovels: #OMN #indymediaback #makeingstory #OGB

In tech, it is really important, to see the unit of measure

Most software today = individualist. Even “collective” tools (Fediverse servers, enterprise SaaS, etc.) are just abstractions that aggregate individuals. The default assumption is the liberal subject: the sovereign individual. The infrastructure is built for self-expression, personal feeds, private chats, me, me, me. That’s why for example, when you step into libertarian codebases like #nostr, the smell of #stupidindividualism is everywhere.

Communities are treated as “groups of individuals,” not as entities. That’s the bourgeois blind spot, a community is not just a pile of people. A village, a crew, an affinity group, a social centre – these are organisms in themselves. They have memory, metabolism, reproduction, decision-making processes that aren’t reducible to a sum of members.

Much of activism and grassroots assemblies already know this, in real life, you’ve seen how assemblies develop rules-of-thumb, consensus practices, and internal cultures. They don’t need hard rules (code) to function; they need space, trust and ritual. What digital tools can do is soft map those existing practices into code, not create more structured #techshit that imposes individualist logic from the normal every day #deathcult priests of Silicon Valley.

So, if we take this different path, what would the balancing of communal-first tech look like? Well, much like the current mod process of good grassroots mastodon instances. Malatesta was right: anarchism is not the absence of “paths”, it’s paths we make for ourselves.

So looking over our shoulder, if we apply this lens to #nostr: The tech is libertarian free market, good for individual broadcasting. If you wanted to fork or layer it for communal use, you’d have to invert its assumptions: design clients that display group deliberation outputs, not only individual chatter. Right now, the #nostr crowd is hostile to this, because they’re blinded by crypto-bro ideology. But the protocol itself is kinda neutral, though the UX is still half-baked.

For #OMN and #indymediaback: This community-as-unit model is already in the DNA (#Indymedia was not a bunch of bloggers; it was collectives federating). The challenge is resisting the gravitational pull of the “common sense”, #mainstreaming, #dotcons control of the #nastyfew who can’t help but push everything to look like personal brands and influencer feeds.

As it should be easy to see, real-world collective practice – assemblies, affinity groups, neighbourhood councils – work differently. The base unit is not the individual but the group, bound by shared process. Thus, we need to build mythos and traditions before tools, decision-making protocols need to be horizontal and social, rather than hard coded digital control. To take this different path, we need to change and challenge the #mainstreaming with #KISS “native” tools, rather than the current mess of retrofitting governance into individualist existing software.

To recap, the unit of measure matters. Most digital tools are still built around the individual user account as the base unit. Everything radiates out from that: identity, control, permissions, content. This encodes #liberal, capitalist assumptions into the tech: atomised people, making “choices,” “connecting” in a marketplace of attention.

The #OMN is there to provide scaffolding for the pat away from this mess: a social layer that privileges collectives over individuals, that federates assemblies not personalities, and that accepts messiness as a feature rather than a bug. This is the path the #OMN can nurture, even if it means swimming against both the #dotcons and the libertarian crypto crowd, because we know that without shared process society collapses into prats, paranoia, and power-hoarding.

Let’s try to compost the mess rather than add to it, the #OMN is a shovel, please try not to be a prat about this, thanks.

Compost the blocking, keep the seeds alive, and make space for growth

It’s good to see more people turning their focus back to the #openweb. For the past five years of the #reboot we’ve been distracted in a signal-to-noise mess from the #fashionistas. That time needs to be over, we need to start looking clearly at both internal rot and the external threats.

A good first step is in balancing the realisation that we actually have far more direct power to deal with the internal mess than we do over the eternal #dotcons and their #closedweb “common sense”. That’s why we need to put activism into composting the internal #blocking (see: https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost). Composting isn’t just a metaphor – it’s a way to recycle the piles of #techshit we’ve built up into soil that can grow new #openweb seeds. #KISS

I understand the focus on the external #dotcons, yes, we also need to keep pushing back against the external enclosures. But inside our own spaces, it’s clear that possessiveness, in code, in reputation, in control over projects, undermines cooperation. It destroys trust, it wastes resources, it corrodes integrity. People often destroy what they love, not out of hate, but out of possession.

This is directly relevant to the degeneration of the #SocialHub project (see: https://hamishcampbell.com/why-teach-everyone-to-code-has-become-a-dead-end-slogan/). What was once the lively centre for the #ActivityPub and #Fediverse reboot is now reduced to a handful of unthinking “problem” people circling the drain. That’s not unusual, it’s a normal outcome when we fail to compost.

The lesson is simple: compost the blocking, keep the seeds alive, and make space for growth.

#OMN resources we can support

Drafting blog posts, polemics, and rallying calls to sharpen the #OMN narrative. Use the compost metaphors (#techshit, seeds, soil) into accessible messaging that sticks. Editing to transform the long posts into shareable, short-form content for Mastodon, Fediverse, and allied networks.

Curating and organizing existing #OMN writings into a structured wiki-style knowledge base. Building summaries, FAQs, and primers for newcomers who hit the projects cold. Draft “composting guides” – how to deal with #blocking, #fashionistas, and #geekproblem inside communities.

Writing simple documentation for the Unite Forge and other #OMN tools. Helping draft roadmaps that explain what’s built, what’s missing, and what needs contributors. Produce explainers on why #OMN is different from #dotcons and #NGO capture, grounded in #4opens.

Write out templates for horizontal decision-making (#OGB style) that projects can adapt. Suggest practical ways to “compost” blockers while keeping the wider network fertile. Help draft neticate rooted in #KISS + #4opens rather than #NGO-speak.

Each of these can be grown into living resources: wiki pages, blog posts, shareable guides, or activist toolkits – depending on where you want the energy to flow.

Coding work https://unite.openworlds.info/explore/repos

Funding work https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

Thinking work https://hamishcampbell.com

Who are the #nastyfew?

Why “teach everyone to code” has become a dead-end slogan

The geek answer (bad faith or blindness): “If only everyone learned to code, then society would be fairer.”

The activist answer: Code is part of the landscape, but culture, governance, and lived practice matter more. We don’t escape domination by teaching more people to type commands, we escape by changing what we do together with the tools.

Why “teach everyone to code” has become a dead-end slogan – it’s been tried, it’s been funded, and yet it hasn’t shifted power one bit. If anything, it’s reinforced the tech priesthood instead of breaking it.

The #geekproblem is exactly this blindness: geeks mistake tools for culture, skill for power, and training for change. They can’t see that the last 20 years of “learn to code” projects have failed precisely because they sidestep politics, trust, and social fabric. It’s comfortable, because it keeps power where it already is.

So, coding literacy might be useful, but it’s not transformative without social literacy – trust, collective governance, open processes. The real activist social tech path is to compost geek mess-making and build alt-cultures where tools serve the collective, not the priesthood.

Otherwise, “coding for all” is another flavour of #blocking – keeping us stuck, distracted, and blind. This is a useful example of the blinded #geekproblem. I use the word blinded to illustrate that people can’t see the sense in front of their faces. And I use the hashtag #blocking to show the outcome of this common “sense” blindness #KISS

Coding is not automatically social power, but in some contexts it does act as power, and understanding when/why helps unpack the #geekproblem.

When coding is not power

Most coding done in industry is low-level labour: writing scripts, fixing bugs, maintaining old systems. These programmers aren’t powerful; they’re workers. Their code serves capital.

Teaching kids to code (“everyone can make an app!”) rarely translates to actual power, because the infrastructure, distribution, and governance of platforms remain controlled by corporations.

Coding on its own doesn’t equal voice. A line of code in a corporate repo is no more socially powerful than a line in a personal diary if the person coding has no agency over how it’s used.

When coding is power

Coding becomes power when it bridges infrastructure + governance + culture.

Building #openweb infrastructure: If you can write the protocols or standards (e.g. ActivityPub, TCP/IP), you shape the possibilities for everyone downstream. That’s a kind of structural power.

Gatekeeping: If you control the codebase of a popular project, you can decide what features exist, whose contributions get merged, and which voices are excluded. This is soft but real power.

Automation and scale: Writing code that automates tasks (e.g. bots, algorithms, moderation tools) gives leverage over many people’s experience, especially when hidden in the background.

Narrative + legitimacy: In activist or grassroots spaces, coders too often get treated as “high priests” because they appear to have magical abilities others lack. This cultural framing inflates their social weight.

The Catch (where the #geekproblem lives)

Coders confuse technical power with social change. They think: “If I can write the tool, I can fix the politics.” But tools reflect cultures. Without collective governance, tools just reproduce existing hierarchies.

The illusion of inevitability: because software underpins modern life, geeks assume society must organize around them. That blindness is what we’re pointing to.

When geeks push “everyone must code” as the path, they miss that most people don’t need to code to have power, they need agency in decision-making and trust networks.

How it really works (coding + social power)

Coding has power when embedded in movements that control their infrastructure. Example: early #Indymedia coders had real social power because their code directly enabled publishing outside corporate media – and at the start they were accountable to activist collectives.

Coding has power when it’s used to mediate flows of attention, trust, and resources. For example, algorithms that boost or bury voices. In grassroots hands, that can be liberatory; in corporate hands, it’s oppressive.

Coding becomes shared power when it is paired with open process (#4opens), shared governance (#OGB), and cultural literacy. Otherwise, it’s generally more priesthood, likely for the #deatcult in the end.

So: coding is like fire. On its own, it’s just heat and light. In the hands of a few, it’s a weapon or a fortress. In the commons, with shared tending, it’s the hearth – collective power.

To recap, coding as social power: Myth vs Reality

Myth 1: Coding = empowerment
We’ve been told that “if everyone learns to code, everyone will have power.” Twenty years of coding bootcamps, “learn to code” initiatives, and school programs prove otherwise. Most of this simply trains people to slot into corporate pipelines. The power stays where it always was.

Reality: Coding on its own is labour, not empowerment. The infrastructure, governance, and distribution layers decide where the power flows. Without culture and collective governance, coding is just fuel for someone else’s engine.

Myth 2: Coding makes you special
Coders often act like priests, holding secret knowledge. In activist spaces, this creates the illusion that coders alone can “save” or “lead.” That’s the #geekproblem in action.

Reality: Tools are only as powerful as the cultures and processes around them. A coder without collective accountability is just another gatekeeper. A coder inside a collective, with open governance (#4opens, #OGB), can help shift power outward.

Myth 3: Coding will fix politics
The geek fantasy: “If I build the right app, the politics will fix itself.” We’ve seen this with countless “alternative platforms” that end up reproducing the same hierarchies.

Reality: Politics is culture, trust, and process. Code can mediate, amplify, or automate, but it cannot replace politics. Tools without culture are empty shells; culture without tools is still possible.

The compost view is the task isn’t to make everyone a coder, but to compost the priesthood and grow cultures where coding is a part of the collective. That’s the #KISS answer: code can support social power, but it is not social power.

What to do to compost this #geekproblem mess:

Build cultures, not just tools: Stop pretending apps fix politics. Tools only matter if they grow inside strong cultures. Put people first, tech second.

Open the process (#4opens): Keep everything open: code, data, governance, strategy. Power hides in shadows; openness dissolves the priesthood. If it’s not open, it’s not our path.

Practice collective governance (#OGB): It helps when decisions about infrastructure are made more horizontally. Coders are part of the collective, not above it. Shared governance turns coding from priesthood into common fire.

The path out of the #geekproblem is in composting geek blindness and building living cultures where coding is a part of growing the commons.

For an example, this post is relevant to the degeneration of the #SocialHub project, which for meany years was the place for #ActivityPub and #Fediverse #openweb reboot, but now what’s left of the social side is the few remaining active unthinking “problem” people.

This is a normal path and outcome, that we need to compost to keep growing seeds #KISS

People destroy things they love, not from hate, more from possession

Smiling-faced vileness: How enforced politeness becomes a weapon in grassroots paths

All too often, the ugliness we face in grassroots spaces wears a smile. It’s smiling-faced vileness: pleasant, agreeable individuals who wield control by blocking dissent, sanitizing movements under the guise of compromise, and maintaining the illusion of consensus. This is especially true in spaces overly tolerant of #NGO-style protocols – those bureaucratic, #fashionista postmodern traps that slowly erode the spark that makes radical communities thrive.

From my work across decades – from protest camps to #openweb projects – I’ve seen this pattern again and again. Projects like early #Indymedia were messy, radical, and fiercely autonomous. That edge, that wildness was slowly excised until what remains is either safe, bland, and powerless or locked down and paranoid, both smother the naive grassroots paths.

At late era #climatecamp i’ve witnessed activist planning groups that masquerade as open and inclusive, but doom radical ideas by policing language. If someone speaks candidly about power or inequality, they risk being labelled as “derailing.” Not unlike what I describe on the Fediverse: “a consensus ritual where insiders quietly veto contentious proposals, pushing them offstage.” The effect is chilling – the bold, and meaningful, get diluted and then silenced.

I’ve also seen “horizontal” groups adopt soft authoritarianism: a handful of insiders subtly side-line contentious voices with endless calls for care, safety and more research or structure, this is simply polite gatekeeping, in those quiet pauses, power consolidates. These practices don’t just kill energy, they devour possibility. They cannibalize the chance for communities that are both fluffy (nurturing) and spiky (radical).

Smiling-face vileness is not satire – it’s #fashionista postmodern gaslighting. It slowly smothers life with calm care and precision. The task of the grassroots is to replant what’s been stomped. That means cultivating friction -mess, disagreement, negotiation – because that is how community grows, trust is built, and real alternatives emerge. Let’s embed this friction into our code, our community practices, our shared care. Let’s compost the #NGO and fashionista chokeholds so we can grow radical, tender, collective futures #KISS

A lot of the “smiling-faced vileness” comes from a mix of personal psychology, learned behaviour, and the systemic incentives that shape #NGO, institutional, and #mainstreaming culture. It’s not usually deep evil – it’s something more banal, entrenched, and self-justifying. Examples of this mess makeing:

Fear of losing control when change threatens the structures they know how to navigate, so they subconsciously (or consciously) try to stop it. Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil idea applies here: harm is done by “ordinary” functionaries protecting their turf “The real danger is not that people will rebel, but that they will acquiesce in doing what they know is wrong.”

Cognitive dissonance management, as they see themselves as “the good guys,” so any action – even blocking positive change – must be reframed as “responsible” or “prudent.” #Postmodern self-protection: everything can be justified with enough narrative spin, “No one is the villain of their own story.”

Status preservation, NGOs and funding orgs reward stability over creativity, hierarchy over challenge. If your position, funding, or reputation depends on maintaining the current order, you will fight disruptive change, even if it’s obviously better “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Incompetence + insecurity, breeds paranoia. If you don’t know how to manage real change, you start to fear those who do. The façade of competence becomes more important than actual results, “When a man’s only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

Groupthink & conformity pressure, #mainstreaming cultures reward going along with the majority, even if the majority is wrong “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

This is why these people who take a cling to “power” often look “nice” on the surface while quietly gutting or neutralising anything spiky, challenging, or any change of path. It’s not just personal malice, it’s a cultural immune system against change, fuelled by fear, vanity, and comfort.

When, the tiny few of these people “secede” in #mainstreaming media (and the history it writes) it is not neutral, it’s a kind of #PR machine. It launders power and polishes away dissent. The smiling faces and “respectable” voices are just the velvet gloves over the iron fist. It’s fake history as PR – it isn’t history as lived memory or contested struggle, it’s official narrative, a “storybook” written to flatter the winners and confuse the rest. That’s why it feels vile and pointless: it distracts, pacifies, and reframes mess as inevitability.

The people who produce this are not innocent. Yes, many are clueless functionaries who internalize the system’s values without question. Others are parasitic aspirants, desperate to climb into the #nastyfew, copying their methods. Even when they do “small goods” (a sympathetic article, a cultural puff piece), in the larger pattern they still serve the mainstreaming machine.

The compost metaphor is about instead of raging endlessly at the mess, take what can be siphoned off (attention, fragments of narrative, disillusioned individuals) and redirect that flow into the alt systems (#OMN, #4opens, Fediverse, grassroots histories) then compost the rest: let it rot, break down, and become the fertilizer for something alive and grounded. Because otherwise we get stuck in their cycle: doom-scrolling their fake stories, wasting energy on reacting instead of building. The challenge is mediation, not just rejection. Spot the toxic flows, tap them for useful nutrients, and feed the roots of alternatives.

#KISS

The OMN with indymediaback and makeinghistory are paths

Most of the mess, and most of the #blocking, comes down to the same old story – ownership and control. Who holds the keys? Who decides? Who gets locked out? Instead of wrestling in that cage, the #OMN takes a simpler path: we walk away.

We put a class of media into the commons, governed openly through the #4opens: open data, open process, open source, and open standards. That means no one can close it down, hoard it, or fence it off for profit. The value comes from the shared pool, not from gatekeeping.

This is the heart of #KISS in the #OMN: make the flows work first, in ways people can understand, and build trust on top of that. The tech exists to serve these flows, not to dictate them. This isn’t about perfect crypto or hard lockdowns; it’s about commoning media so that everyone has the right to read, share, and build on it.

Yes, the #mainstreaming mess will eventually follow us – as it always does. But the plan and hope is that by the time it catches up, the habits, culture, and expectations we’ve grown around open media will have shifted society enough that the old traps won’t work the same way. If we’ve done our job, the default will be more open, collaborative, and accountable, not locked down. That’s the #KISS path: simple, resilient, and grounded in the commons.

On the #OMN with #indymediaback and #makeinghistory paths – We’re not talking about a single bridge, but a federated ecosystem, with the current example of both #DAT and #ActivityPub running on the same server, sharing a common database of media objects. As the data flows, text and metadata are redundantly stored in the open (#4opens). That way, if one server gets hacked, it can simply be rolled back and restored from the wider pool. #KISS

The P2P side works much like #nostr in that it can have a list of flows in and out to servers and can use any of these to publish and receive media on the #openweb. The advantage of the #p2p app side is that each local app in a backup for the online servers (see #makeinghistory), which as critics say can be, and will be, taken down some times. Also, they will work in their own right for people who need a more locked down path, and this will be needed in more repressive spaces and times. The clear advantage is this still gives them outflows to the wider #mainstreaming client server media outreach, to what matters, effect, so it ticks both boxes.

We aim to solve technical issues with human-understandable social paths, not hard tech for its own sake. Yes, in a minority of cases hard tech will be needed – but that’s for the #geeks to solve after the working social paths are clear, not before.

We fix problems through #KISS social processes and #4opens transparency, not by defaulting to encryption and lockdown. Hacking is outside the focus scope of the #OMN. What we’re building is about trust and flows, not code as an end in itself. Hacking belongs on the #geek paths – useful, but only after the trust and flows are established. The code should be there to secure what’s been built, not to block it before it exists.

Without trust and working flows, there’s no value at all, no matter how secure, encrypted, or elegant the tech stack. If the campaigns, activism, and people aren’t using it, the system is pointless. And being pointless is something we need to be more honest about. Building for the sake of building, while ignoring the social, community layer, feeds the #geekproblem and starves the movement.

So, what can people actually do in the real world to make this path happen?

If you have resources, you can help fund the development work – keeping it in the hands of the people actually building the open commons, not some corporate gatekeeper.

If you’re technical, you can code the applications and servers that power the flows. We need builders who understand that trust and usability come first, not shiny tech for its own sake.

If you work in UX or testing, you can make sure what we build is something real people can actually use and trust – simple, clear, and accessible.

If you do media, you can tell the story. Write, film, photograph, blog, podcast – whatever it takes to spread the word. The more people hear about an alternative that works, the more chance it has to grow.

Whatever your skills or resources, the important thing is to get involved in the flow. This is not a spectator sport, and the is unlikely to be pay, it’s #DIY so the commons will only be built if we build it together. #KISS #4opens #OMN

Building bridges instead of walls

Activist tech has been stuck in “bunker mode” for 20 years, and the only way out is to start building #4opens native, commons-first systems that store, share, and protect movement knowledge in ways that don’t require a priesthood of insiders to operate.

Activist tech has been stuck in a defensive crouch

In an active movement, forum threads, shared docs, livestreams, and photos aren’t just chat noise, they’re collective memory. If we treat them as disposable, we throw away the hard-earned lessons that future activists will desperately need. The solution is #KISS-fed, redundant, federated archiving:

All public movement data sits in the commons.

Metadata + content are mirrored across multiple federated nodes.

Backups are easy to pull, restore, and re-seed by anyone who ever has trust access.

Data is grouped via hashtags, not rigid taxonomies, so it flows where it’s needed.

This is appropriate tech: low-complexity, high-resilience, built for social utility first. But for this to grow it can’t be mediated to death by the #geekproblem – code should follow social needs, not the other way round. If we can get this kind of infrastructure running, we stop losing our history, we keep movements porous instead of paranoid, and we finally start building bridges instead of walls.

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network

Let’s look at an example of this: For the #DAT protocol to become relevant in #FOSS activist tech, we need to stop treating it as an isolated island and start building solid bridges to #ActivityPub. The two are not enemies – they are complementary paths. p2p tools and protocols like DAT brings distributed, peer-to-peer file persistence; ActivityPub brings the social layer, discovery, and conversation. Together, they create a space where activists choose their preferred path without being siloed or alienated, and without the unhealthy isolation that comes from the current #geekproblem habit of fetishising one protocol at the expense of all others.

Diversity is the basis of any healthy ecosystem – biological, social, or technological. In nature, monocultures are fragile; in tech, monocultures are authoritarian. We need to approach activist infrastructure with the same principles that make ecosystems thrive: multiple species of tools, cross-pollination between communities, and a constant flow of ideas and resources. This doesn’t mean adding complexity for complexity’s sake; it means designing with #KISS in mind, while ensuring redundancy and adaptability.

If we take this ecological view of the #openweb, then bridges are not optional extras – they are the lifelines. In our example, by linking #DAT and #ActivityPub, we create a richer habitat for movements to live in. We make it harder for corporate capture to take root, and we give people the freedom to move between spaces without losing connection and context. That’s how we replace the bunker mentality with a real commons, not just defensive walls, but thriving, interconnected gardens.

Rebalance, by shifting focus from tools to cultures

Appropriate technology in activist tech means tools built for our real contexts, not for Silicon Valley fantasies or bunker-dwelling paranoia. It’s about lightweight, repairable, understandable systems that communities can actually run, adapt, and share. Right now, the #geekproblem pushes us toward shiny, #dotcons shaped over-engineered toys that serve developer ego more than people and community need or bloated encryption stacks nobody understands, federated protocols that collapse under complexity, and endless half-finished “next big things” with no grounding in actual social use.

We need to drag the conversation back to fit for purpose, tech that works in the messy, underfunded, real world of activism, where trust and openness are the foundation, and security is woven in without becoming a fetish that locks us away from each other.

The #fedivers #openweb reboot of the last ten years is a good first step, but it embeds meany of the #mainstreaming issues and has the deep #geekproblems embedded into its culture and tech stacks. A second step away from this is, the social understanding, that security doesn’t come from code alone, it comes from the community that surrounds it. Without a living, visible, and shared culture, the best tools are just dead weight.

The path starts with embedding our tools inside open, self-documenting, collective cultures. If you can’t see how decisions happen, you’re just replacing one opaque power structure with another.

Forget the myth of the “perfect” platform. What we need are messy but resilient spaces, a diversity of nodes, loosely connected, each carrying its own part of the load.

Build commons-first infrastructure, to re-anchor our work in openness, federation, and trust-based networks baked in from the start. The baseline is #4opens – open data, open source, open standards, open process – non-negotiable.

On this path, the #OMN (Open Media Network) can be the publishing spine: a trust-based network where stories, actions, and knowledge move between activist spaces without corporate choke points and #blocking.

We must bridge into existing real-world struggles – unions, climate justice, housing fights. Tech that only talks to other techies is just another dead end.

Stop digging the same hole, we stop wasting energy on projects that make us smaller and weaker:

No more encryption fetishism. Encryption is the lock on the door, not the whole house.

No more closed, invite-only dev silos. If you can’t talk openly about the work, it’s either the wrong work or the wrong space.

No more “founder cult” projects that collapse when one person burns out or drifts off.

Security is not enough, survival is not victory, we can be safe and irrelevant – or vulnerable and changing the world by breaking corporate dependency, by building the infrastructure of a post-#dotcons world. This isn’t about perfect software, it’s about building the cultures that can use it – and win.

Stories on this subject:

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/MakingHistory/wiki/Story+-+Oxford%3A+Going+with+The+Flow.-

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody/wiki/Out+reach+short+story+-+Stalls+and+Code.-

What is it that blocks this needed change and challenge? #Geekproblem is about when the “solution” Is the problem. One of the most frustrating things is how often its defenders mistake their narrow fixations for universal solutions, or worse, offer them up in bad faith to derail the real conversation.

You’ll raise an issue – social, political, cultural – and instead of engaging with the messy, human, collective work needed to address it, the geek brain rushes to replace it with a neat technical patch. The tool, the workflow, the protocol. As if the complexity of human trust, governance, and solidarity can be debugged into submission.

This isn’t just misunderstanding; sometimes it’s sabotage. By framing the “solution” purely in terms of tech or procedure, they strip the problem of its social and political context. What remains is something sterile, depoliticised, and ultimately unfit for purpose.

It’s why I keep bringing this up. Because if we don’t name the #Geekproblem for what it is, we’ll keep circling in the same loops, patching over social fractures with shiny but hollow code. The answer isn’t more complexity; it’s #KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Simple in the sense of clear, human-first, and grounded in open, accessible processes.

The truth is, solving problems in the #openweb isn’t about cleverness or code alone. It’s about people, and unless the geeks can learn to work with that, rather than overwrite it, they’ll stay part of the problem, the #geekproblem

Please, please try not to keep being a prat about this.

Smiling-faced vileness: How enforced politeness becomes a weapon in grassroots paths