Digging over the rot and planting something more real

Q: People are angry about #AI scrapers and that this is exploiting everything for “free” – our art, our words, our data. But let’s be honest, we’ve spent the last 40 years gorging on “free” content online, music, games, video, writing, without paying for a thing unless forced to with a paywall. Yes. We block the ads, we hate the tracking, and we very rarely donate. So… with the idea that everything has to be paid for, are we really that different from the AI scraping machine?

A: The current “common sense” frames this as a moral issue, but it’s better seen as a systemic one. And that’s where people keep getting lost in talking about this.

We live in a society rooted in greed and extraction. That’s the baseline. It’s called capitalism, and for the last 40 years it’s been accelerated by the neoliberal #deathcult, where today “ethics” is bought in plastic tubs of organic yogurt at our local supermarket.

What grows out of this shit heap? #Stupidindividualism, people demanding everything for free while shouting about their personal rights to consume. They want to save the planet, but only with next-day delivery and zero commitment. Then you’ve got the #fashionistas – the “good people” who “perform” care while feeding the same destructive paths. It’s not irony, it’s the logic of the path we take.

No, I don’t want tracking ads. No, I don’t want my ideas and writing turned into #AI sludge. But I’m also not pretending this is a matter of “personal choice”, when we need to shout loudly and continually that it’s a system built to turn “creators” into social shit and call it innovation, when better to speak truth and call it compost.

We don’t fix this by feeling guilty, we fix it by building something else. That’s what #OMN is for, that’s why #4opens matter. Public media, open processes, radical trust, of native #openweb paths, not just another polished platform for exploitation with feel good #UX

It’s not about blame. It’s about digging over the rot and planting something more real #KISS

Without discomfort, we won’t challenge the system we’re still living inside

A core problem we’ve inherited from the last ten years of corporate social media, the #dotcons, is the toxic confusion of the personal and the public. Platforms like #Facebook and #Twitter blurred the lines between private conversation and public broadcasting, monetizing both as if they were the same. That mess wasn’t accidental; it was profitable.

Unfortunately, we’ve reproduced this mess on the #Fediverse without properly composting it first. What does that mean? We’ve taken this tangled, unhealthy paths and rebuilt them with new tools, many of them open-source, but we haven’t separated the core issues or composted the conceptual slate. As a result, we still see confusion around what content belongs in the public commons and what should stay private. People are still posting as if they’re in a private chat while standing on a soapbox, or trying to gatekeep public news through private group dynamics.

The reality is: we already have a clear, simple solution.

The Fediverse is public. It is for public media, public conversation, news, projects, what we want to share with the world.
Encrypted chat apps (like Signal) are for private communication, what we want to keep between individuals or trusted groups.

It’s needs to be simple #KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid, but instead, we have well-meaning but unthinking devs and users trying to remix the worst of #dotcons culture, mushing together public and private spaces, throwing moderation at everything like it’s a catch-all fix, and muddying the waters of what these networks are actually for.

This is not innovation, it’s common crap behavior inherited from systems built to manipulate, monetize, and pacify us. If we want real, trusted, meaningful media, we have to get back to basics: public news needs to be built on #4opens, and it needs to be created, distributed, and discussed in public spaces.

That’s why projects like #OMN (Open Media Network), #OGB (Open Governance Body), and the #indymediaback reboot matter. They offer models where grassroots, trust-based publishing thrives again, outside #NGO capture and corporate enclosure.

With this change in mind, why the #Deathcult Hashtag?

People often ask why I use the hashtag #deathcult so much. It’s provocative, yes, but it’s not just for shock value. It’s a term that names the dominant ideology of the last 40 years: neoliberalism. An ideology so pervasive that most people can’t see it anymore, even while it’s actively eroding the very values they claim to hold.

You see it when a liberal proudly buys “organic” yogurt at Safeway while supporting systems that are destroying the planet. That’s not just irony, that’s the entire logic of the deathcult. It’s the normalization of destruction wrapped in “ethical” branding. And no, it’s not just the yogurt—that’s just the joke. It’s everything: our phones, our work, our schools, our activism.

If you can’t find a part of your life untouched by the deathcult, it’s because it has touched everything. That’s why the hashtag exists: to make people uncomfortable. Because without that discomfort, we won’t challenge the roots of the system we’re all still living inside.

This moment isn’t about reinventing wheels, it’s about returning to native paths. The public internet worked before. Let’s compost the #techshit, usefully separate the public from the private, and rebuild on clear, #4opens foundations.

We can do better, we already know how, let’s stop pretending we don’t.

If I were a Communist

Let’s get the shit-shoveling out of the way first. People get twitchy about the word Communism, waving their arms about “utopian” back-to-the-land communes or religious cults that gave up on society and ran off into the woods, on one side and on the other expansionist empires. That’s not what we’re talking about. Those were retreats, both dead ends. They didn’t believe the world can change, so they isolated themselves and built closed states in the shadows of the #deathcult empire we to often live in. That’s not compost, that’s too often decay.

What I would mean by Communism is radically simple: a society based on practical equality. That means everyone has what they need, and nobody gets to hoard. It’s not abstract, it’s built on what people can do and what they really need, no more and no less.

And this grows out of a basic truth, humans are social creatures. We exist inside society, not apart from it. So any real ethics, any workable economics, has to start there. The individual is not some walled-off unit of value, that’s the poison the #deathcult worships. And under the current system, that poison is poured into everything. It’s why we get so much waste, so much suffering, and why inequality isn’t a glitch, it’s the damn #mainstreaming path.

So let’s be honest. There are only two ways to organize society: Slavery or Equality. Everything else is a mask. What we’ve got now is, for most people, the latest version of slavery – Wage Labour – which is just chattel slavery with the branding updated, and the chains made invisible. The #nastyfew ruling class, the “worthy”, decide what’s valuable and over the long term try and squeeze the rest of us dry. These self-declared “useful” people are entirely parasitic. The only productive class is the one they exploit: the workers, the creators, the growers. The rest are just shuffling paper and shifting blame, smoke and mirrors.

Every age has dressed this up differently. Rome had chains. Feudalism had serfs. Now we have debt, wages, and endless hustle. Same shit, different form. But the composting truth, we’ve arrived at a point in history where this can break down. The system that enslaved us has finally created the possibility of liberation. That’s the dialectic, out of the rot, we can grow something living.

Communism does not need to be a dream – it can be a practical toolkit for that growth. It says:

From each according to their capacity, to each according to their need.

And when they ask, “But how will you measure someone’s need?” we answer, in a real society, people grow up inside a culture of mutual care. You stop thinking in terms of what you can grab and start thinking in terms of what you can share. The culture composts greed. The idea of stepping on someone else to get ahead just doesn’t make sense anymore.

You want doctors? You make space for people who want to heal, not for those who want a title and a paycheck. The community will support their learning because everyone benefits. A fake doctor who slides through on bullshit credentials won’t last long in a society that knows what real care looks like. The mask won’t work anymore.

Yes, we’ll still need to deal with logistics, conflict, even assholes, “communism” isn’t heaven, it’s just a #KISS honest way to live. And it can maybe handle everything the current system handles, only better. Capitalism is a hack job, it hoards, it wastes, it burns people out. A communal society builds real wealth: time, beauty, knowledge, unpolluted air, clean water, and space to actually live.

And how do we get there? Not by magic. Not by seizing the TV stations and declaring victory. The revolution is already underway. But it’s compost, not dynamite. We’re building a soil layer thick enough for life to grow.

It starts by making more communists, by spreading the seed idea, that equality isn’t just desirable, it’s necessary. It grows when workers demand not just crumbs but real power, not reforms, but transformation. First they fight for better pay, then for control, and finally they realize the masters have no magic, no divine right – just theft, backed by violence and lies.

The change won’t come as a single event. It’s a long decay and regrowth – a shift from brittle control to living interdependence. The capitalist state will still try to crush this change when the time comes, but by then, it could be too late. Its legitimacy will have rotted away. People will already be walking, building the alternative paths.

In short:

I could be a Communist because the current system is slavery with marketing.

I could be a Communist because I believe in people, not profit.

I could be a Communist because the future can be communal, or there will be no future.

It’s not utopia. It’s not perfect. It’s just a path forward that doesn’t end in collapse, burnout, and brutal inequality. This isn’t a manifesto. It’s a spade in the soil. Time to dig.

We need to compost the spiky and the fluffy nasty

From hard walls to fluffy blocks – let’s compost the negative nastiness in our progressive spaces.

A reflection on toxic communication in radical spaces, and how to build something better.

In the 20th century, much of the nastiness came from the hard vertical left. Back then, control, ideology, and vanguardism created rigid hierarchies, enforced through forceful exclusion and dogma. In the 21st century, that same exclusion comes from the “fluffy” horizontal left, the #fashionista crew wrapped in progressive aesthetics. It’s still fear and control. It’s still the same mess. And it still needs composting.

Even in spaces that claim openness and justice, we see “common sense” pushing of gatekeeping, moral absolutism. From both ends, the old vertical hardliners and the new fluffy puritans, we’re still well stuck in cycles of not hearing each other. One of the hard problems of the current left/progressive paths is this intolerance and dogmatic nastiness dressed up in fluffy cloth. Historically, from the hard vertical left, but much more common today is from our “fluffy” #fashionista “progressive” crew and their pushing of postmodernist language games as #blocking.

It’s a real and persistent issue in left/progressive paths, we do all service by worshipping a #deathcult, so people are often “wrong” as this common sense worship is the normal, not the exception. It is a cycle where gatekeeping, moral absolutism, and social exclusion dominate on every side. But when this comes from the “fluffy” or “horizontal” side, it is even harder to talk about, as it’s too often masked as care or safety, but still ends up reinforcing fear and control.

Non-nasty communication would be rooted in trust, a touch of humility, and most importantly shared purpose, and could look like a presumption of good intent, default to assuming people are trying, even if they fail. Then we need to replace instant cancellation with curiosity, “What do you mean by that?” or “Can we unpack that together?” in more constipated language that works for some more academic people.

Yes we do need clear boundaries without exclusion, you can say “That’s not OK here” without blocking, shaming, or exiling. Encouraging dialogue before disengagement builds stronger communities than isolation does. Then in every step visible open process (#4opens Style).

In group process, clear decision-making, open archives, transparent moderation, and rotating responsibility make space for people to learn and grow instead of fear missteps. If this goes wrong, and it will, deep listening, slow speaking. Let things sit. Respond with reflection, not reflex. Allow pauses and silences; don’t rush to dominate with the “correct” take.

In the end, it’s best to see conflict as compost, not crisis. See disagreement as a chance to grow shared understanding, hold space for messy difference rather than rushing to resolution or punishment. A part of this is inviting language, use “we,” “let’s,” and questions more than commands or declarations. Say “I’m wondering if…” instead of “You’re wrong because…”

In short and sharp, what to do when people are “wrong”, treat people as comrades, not problems is a good first step. Communication should be generative, less about winning, more about creating together. #KISS we do need to compost this nasty mess, do you need a shovel #OMN

Then OK in the end you might end up hitting each other, but this should always be long down the process path, long down. Hope this helps 😉

Dev test work for Makinghistory application

The #makinghistory project is a decentralized, open-source archiving and storytelling network designed to preserve and amplify grassroots histories. It’s founded on the idea that history isn’t written by the winners – it’s made by those who resist, build, and care. Using digitized collections like the CampbellFamily archive as a seed, the project invites communities to reclaim their narratives through shared, federated networks. This isn’t just another data repository – it’s a living, breathing ecosystem where collective memory is gathered, enriched, and kept accessible for future generations and movements.

The application functions as a community-installable tool that allows anyone to host their own archive node. These nodes, whether local or remote, connect into a wider peer-to-peer network of storytellers, archivists, and activists. Core features include uploading and organizing digital files, enriching metadata flows, and linking material to broader narratives using human-created tags and annotations. The platform follows a participation-first path, encouraging affinity groups to contribute not just data, but context, weaving a rich web of interlinked histories.

But #makinghistory goes further than archiving. It’s a space for collaborative storytelling, publishing, and public exhibition. Its narrative layer draws from the archive to trace connections between people, places, and events, transforming scattered fragments into stories of solidarity, resistance, and change. These outputs feed both digital commons and real-world installations like the Resistance Exhibition, where history is brought to life in public, participatory spaces. This is the infrastructure for radical memory work, a composting system for movement knowledge. Developers are not just needed to build features, they’re invited to help shape the very flows and protocols that keep history in the hands of those who live it.

Developer Roadmap: #makeinghistory – Testing & Prototyping

Phase 1: Core Object Listing
- Implement a single-column interface that lists objects (text, image, link).
- Set up two test instances that can post and sync objects between them.
- Default view lists objects by most recent. Super simple.
Phase 2: Hashtag Columns
- Add support for hashtag-based columns (inspired by Mastodon’s Tweetdeck interface).
- Reuse and adapt existing open-source implementations where possible.
Phase 3: Story Objects
- Introduce a new “Story” object that composes and links existing media objects, with added narrative context.
- These stories are published through collective/community accounts (discussion needed on access/trust models).
Phase 4: Federation & Flows
- Begin mapping and testing how edits, hashtags, comments, and objects flow across federated instances.
- Align this with the #OMN trust model and the work from the #indymediaback reboot (estimated 90% overlap).
User Interfaces
- Desktop: Use a Tweetdeck-style interface, similar to Mastodon’s current layout.
- Mobile: Build a simplified UI with a single-column scroll. Objects open fullscreen with sideways swiping (like Tusky for Mastodon).
Every Object
- Has edit capabilities (if user has login/auth).
- Editable hashtags.
- Comment threads.
- All changes sync across instances via federation/trust flows (option 4).

The current test interface and images will need refreshing, as they’re based on early-stage mockups. But the concept remains: keep the interface minimal, usable, and focused on narrative composting. This project is both infrastructure and imagination, grounded in the old but reaching toward the new.

These images need an update as they were based on the dev work from back in the day. This is the very basic interface for testing. The mobile user facing interface is a flick sideways basic interface.

The logic and workflow are all based on the OMN project and have likely a 90% overlap with the indymediaback project

DEV of the #OMN projects

At the core of the #makinghistory infrastructure lies the Open Media Network (#OMN) – a trust-based, human-moderated, #4opens project that offers a decentralized, federated database shared across peers. What makes the OMN unique isn’t just what it does – but what it refuses to do. Rather than chasing complexity or abstract “AI-powered” solutions, the OMN focuses on simplicity and social cohesion, using technology to support and grow human networks. Its structure is purposefully minimal, with only five essential functions:

These core functions are: Publish (to share a story as an object into a stream); Subscribe (to people, pages, groups, or subjects); Moderate (to express trust or disapproval by pushing or pulling content); Rollback (to remove content from your stream based on trust flows); and Edit (to collaboratively change metadata across federated nodes where you’re authenticated). This framework serves as the back-end engine for building a grassroots, DIY semantic web. The front-end can take many forms: city-based or subject-specific sites like a modern reboot of Indymedia, regional storytelling platforms, or thematic archives like #makinghistory. Protocols like ActivityPub form the connective tissue of this system, the plumbing.

In practice, this means people can build meaningful media spaces that reflect local struggles and solidarities without being dependent on corporate platforms or NGO gatekeeping. The data cauldron of the OMN stores the shared knowledge, and every community holds a golden ladle – a way to draw out, remix, and republish what matters to them. If you’re interested in supporting this effort financially, you can do so via Open Collective. And if you’re ready to dive deeper, we need to make this #KISS project work. Let’s build tools for memory, not marketing, infrastructure for resistance, not careerism. Let’s be #makeinghistory together, not sit bord looking at a screen.

This #OMN path is “native” built on a simple, powerful truth: “This is the Internet”:

GET
PUT
POST
DELETE
–MERGE–

These basic actions — close to the core HTTP verbs every website uses — are all you need to create, share, remix, and grow.
(From RFC 7231 and RFC 5789.)

Then you have the #4opens which are about reclaiming the grassroots social power of the web:

Open data

Open source

Open process

Open standards

No gatekeepers. No #dotcons middlemen. No closed silos. Just people, building together. This is what #openweb reboot looks like.

From unstoppable slop, to #enshittification, the #FT on the internet is adding to the mess

#Mainstreaming talk about the internet generally completely misses the point, yep, it’s the FT so no surprise I suppose. The actual internet, the one we built before the takeover of the #dotcons, this is a culture of #4opens protocols, stitched together with moth-eaten mythologies and some messy traditions. It was never clean or pure, but it was ours.

What this guy in the article is describing isn’t the internet, it’s the #dotcons layer that’s been built on top of that original infrastructure. Worse, it’s very crap path that we helped build, by feeding it with our time, attention, and data. Yes, it’s a mess. But, the bigger problem is what we often do is add to this mess instead of composting it.

From “unstoppable slop” to “enshittification” to the idea of a “hostile internet”, all of these have explanatory power, but none really get to the root issues. The sickness isn’t just tech, it’s culture, warped by power and profit. What we’re living in now isn’t a broken system, it’s a deliberately built one. Designed not for us, but to extract from us. This #hostileinternet is not inevitable. It’s the result of a thousand bad decisions made by #deathcult tech and #VC backed greed, and not by accident but by design.

The FT piece ends up saying: “The internet makes us seem mad, always connected, always performing, always consuming – like streetcorner eccentrics amplified to global scale.” And yeah, it does feel like that. But that’s not the fault of the internet. It’s the fault of which internet we’ve chosen to feed. To fix this, we don’t need a new system. We need to remember the old one.
Compost the current slop. Rebuild from the roots. Base it on native #4opens, community, and the culture that carried us before this #dotcons mess took over.

#openweb #AI #AISlop #GenerativeAI #KISS #nothingnew

Mythos and traditions are needed for revolutions to grow roots

If you want your revolution to succeed, it’s a good to push and grow from mythos and traditions, and grow from shared histories. Yes, Marxism and European #anarchism are coming back into fashion as source code of radical politics. But if we are to actually achieve anything this time round, we need to see and act, in balance, a #KISS understanding that most of what they propose already existed in indigenous and non-Western cultures. Ideas like #mutualaid, communal land, anti-hierarchy, #dialectics – these aren’t Euro inventions. They were lived reality for societies built on relationships, protocols, obligations, stories, land.

The path that we so often miss in our activism is those indigenous systems were rooted in culture, not just politics. That’s why they could survive under centuries of attack from #colonialism and #capitalism. It wasn’t theory that held them together, it was the social infrastructure of caring.

Way too often our western left tries to reassemble this through ideology alone, in a culture already stripped of land, kinship, and tradition. That’s why left projects so often keep collapsing – #theory isn’t enough. You can’t build lasting community on politics without #relationalfabric. No story, no shared values, no “spiritual” grounding, and everything becomes a power game, a purity spiral, a mess of ego and disconnection.

Even where Marxism and Anarchism succeeded for a time: #CNTFAI, the #Zapatistas, the #USSR you can see that it was growing from existing cultural roots. The political theory sprouted from culture, it didn’t grow without it. And when that cultural roots got disrupted? So do the movement.

In meany ways, Marxists dismiss indigenous societies as primitive, when they already lived what meany of the western radicals dreamed of. That’s the core paradox, Maximists to often wants what they ignore. They reach for communal life while scorning the few people who still kinda live it. #Anarchism tends to follow the same path, beautiful ideas, but no soil to grow in.

You want your revolution? Start with compost. The #4opens, land, kinship, accountability, shared story. Don’t fight the #deathcult with manifestos, root your tech and your politics in #livingculture. We don’t need more theory. To balance the current mess, we need to remember what we already knew.

Messy language feeds back into our messy culture

The #blocking of current action, the constant stalls, confusion, and fragmentation, has a lot to do with the mess our use of language makes. And the deeper issue is how this messy language feeds back into our culture, which then loops back to make the language even murkier. It’s a feedback loop that clouds meaning, erodes trust, and paralyses collective action.

The last 40 years of postmodernism and neo-liberalism have made this worse. #Postmodernism chipped away at the idea of shared reality, leaving us with endless interpretation and “personal truths.” #Neoliberalism, on the other hand, commodified everything, including language itself, into marketing, spin, and #PR. Together, they’ve hollowed out words like “community,” “freedom,” and even “change,” to the point that we barely recognize what they mean any more.

Take “mutual aid” for example, a term grounded in deep solidarity and reciprocal responsibility. Now, on both #dotcons and #openweb platforms, it gets reduced to casual crowdfunding and anonymous asks, with little relational context. Not bad, but far from what it could and needs to be.

If we want affinity-based action to work, if we want people to come together and trust and act together, then we have to compost this mess. And the way to do that might be surprisingly simple #KISS — Keep It Simple, Stupid, not stupid as in naive, but stupid as in clear.

We need to reclaim simple language that carries shared meaning. This is exactly what we’re trying to seed with the positive side of the #hashtag story. Hashtags can act as anchors in this storm of abstraction. They cut through noise, bring us back to the root meaning, and allow collective orientation without needing corporate gatekeepers or institutional filters.

Think:

#4opens — a shorthand for open code, open data, open governance, open standards.
#deathcult — pointing to the suicidal path of #neoliberalism.
#techshit — composting the mess, not throwing it away.
#nothingnew — slowing tech churn, reclaiming meaningful pace and paths.

Each of these tags points to deeper, shared narratives that are simple, but not simplistic. They invite action, not confusion. Compost the abstraction. Regrow clarity. Reclaim trust paths in both tech and social spaces. Speak simply, act clearly, hashtag wisely with intention.

On this working path, It is important for the progressives and radicals to come together and focus on the real issues and challenges facing society, rather than fighting among ourselves. Finding this balance between being “nice” and being “nasty” is key to being effective in bringing about any lasting social change.

The #hashtags embody a story and worldview rooted in a progressive and critical perspective on technology and society. They highlight the destructive impact of neoliberalism (#deathcult) and consumer capitalism (#fashernista) on our shared lives, while promoting the original ideals of the World Wide Web and early internet culture (#openweb).

The #closedweb critiques the for-profit internet and its harmful social consequences, while #4opens advocates for transparency, collaboration, and open-source principles in tech development.

The #geekproblem tag draws attention to a cultural tendency in tech: where geeks, absorbed in their tools and logic, overlook the broader social effects of their creations. This feeds into #techshit, where layers of unnecessary complexity pile up, further distancing people from tech’s social roots. Meanwhile, #encryptionists critiques the knee-jerk reaction that “more encryption” is always the answer, reinforcing control and scarcity, rather than liberating people and community.

Together, hashtags tell a coherent and powerful story. They call for a more humane, collaborative, and transparent approach to both technology and society.

#nothingnew asks whether constant innovation is the right path — or if we need to slow down and improve what already works.

#techchurn names the cycle of flashy, redundant tech that fails to solve core issues.

#OMN and #indymediaback point toward an Open Media Network — and a revival of the radical, decentralized media that once rivalled corporate media on the early web.

#OGB stands for Open Governance Body, an invitation to practice grassroots, transparent, community-led decision-making.

It’s an ambitious but needed path and goal, to build social tech networks that “fail well”, meaning they fail in a way that can be fixed by the people, through trust and collective action, not closed-source patches and corporate updates. The #OMN’s focus is human-first. Tech comes second, as a mediator, a tool, not the destination.

Yes, the #geekproblem is real. Technical expertise becomes a gatekeeping mechanism. But tech can also empower, if we design for simplicity, accessibility, and community-first paths and values. The only working path is simple, trust-based, and human. That’s why we keep coming back to #KISS.

Why haven’t we been dealing with this for the last 10 Years? Over the past decade, we’ve lived in a state of quiet paralysis. Climate change, ecological collapse, technological overreach, all of it loomed. And instead of digging in, we froze. Well-meaning people chose fear over action. Understandably. But fear is a poor foundation for building anything sustainable.

We’re on this site to only blame – we’re here to compost. The problem? We stopped critiquing. We stopped examining the tools in our hands. Not only that, but we bought into the illusion that #NGO paths and tech would save us. That shiny apps and startup culture could greenwash a better future. And when the results disappointed, we turned inward, stopped questioning, and left things to rot.

But what if that rot could be composted? By using the #4opens – open data, open code, open standards for open governance, we have a practical framework to call out and compost the layers of #techshit that have built up. Tech that divides us, tech that distracts us, tech that damages the planet and calls it progress. Yes, like gardening, composting takes time. It smells at first. It’s messy. But give it care, and you get soil. Soil to plant better ideas in. Soil for hope.

One of the reasons we haven’t made progress is the #geekproblem, a narrow slice of technically-minded culture mad up of (stupid)individuals, which so far have dominated the design and direction of our tools. They mean well, often. But in their obsession with technical elegance and “solutions,” they’ve sidelined the social and the ecological. What’s left is a brittle, sterile infrastructure, constantly churning out newness without any substance.

Meanwhile, #stupidindividualism has flourished, encouraged by #dotcons social media systems built for engagement, not connection. These silos encourage performance over solidarity, branding over community, and endless scrolling over doing. We’ve all felt it.

And most activist groups, instead of resisting this tide, drank the #NGO poison, chasing funding, watering down their goals, professionalizing their resistance until it became another logo in a funding application. We’ve lost a decade to fear, distraction, and capture. But it’s maybe not too late.

We have the tools, in the #ActivityPub based #Fediverse. We have the frameworks, the #4opens can guide us to rebuild with transparency, collaboration, and care. The hashtags like #geekproblem, #techshit, #nothingnew, and #OMN give us a shared vocabulary for critique and regeneration. They point to a web where people, not platforms, hold power, and where technology serves life, not control. Let’s stop being afraid to critique. Let’s stop outsourcing responsibility and get on with composting.

Because that’s where the soil of a better path will come from.

On being a prat in tech and social spaces (Yes, this might be about you 😘)

From where I’m standing, a lot of people are being absolute prats when it comes to social and technological issues. That should be obvious… but clearly, it’s not. We’ve got two basic paths here:

#Block everything you don’t like. Predictably, this just creates more prat-ish behaviour and pushes us all deeper into toxic bubbles.
Ask questions. Grow. Listen. Respond. This reduces prat-ish behaviour – over time, maybe even composts it into something useful.

Now, in the era of #stupidindividualism, which path do you think most people are taking? Yeah. That one. If you’re blocking conversations that challenge you, you’re still kneeling at the altar of the #deathcult. Look up. You’re making a mess of social technology.

“Get off your knees” comes to mind, stop worshipping the #deathcult of neoliberalism, salted with postmodernism. These ideologies have poisoned our communities by turning freedom into isolation and choice into greed. I’m all for freedom, yes, you can choose to be a prat. But I reserve the freedom to call that behaviour toxic and self-destructive. What you do with that communication is up to you, just don’t pretend that #blocking it is some kind of moral high ground.

As Thalia Campbell rightly says, sometimes the best path is just to kindly correct, share info, or talk things through face-to-face. Most of this online prat-ness wouldn’t survive a real conversation, it’s bloated on anonymity, context collapse, and dopamine-fuelled feedback loops.

Yes, what meany people do now is a mess, but mess makes good compost, compost builds soil, soil feeds the common good. And talking about “common sense” is just a way of stirring that compost.

But here’s the mess makeing: we keep repeating the same shit, and instead of composting, we leave it to fester. Capitalism, rooted in self-interested greed, claims to serve the common good. But on the fundamentalist path we have been on for 40 years, it’s clearly failing. War. Growing economic divides. Visible #climatechaos. Poisoned ecosystems and communities.

We can’t survive, or flourish, in a society based on greed. That’s just a simple #KISS message. And neoliberalism, still much of our #mainstreming “common sense”, is nothing but extreme capitalism. It’s the purest form of the #deathcult. It’s eating us alive. Please talk about this.

The #dotcons we have been building our lives in for the last 20 years are undiluted deathcult, surveillance capitalism wrapped in shiny UX. The #openweb? Often like herding cats. And scratch the surface, and yes, sometimes you find the #deathcult there too. But we can’t keep going down this path. We need to stop pushing #mainstreaming agendas that lead us back into the same poisoned mess. That path is BAD. It’s ending in ruin.

We’ve got to try, seriously try, to make things better. Not perfect. Not flashy. Just better.

And that means less prat-ing about. More compost. More care. More common good.

Can people engage with the #4opens process?

The #4opens is a completely obverse social restating of the #FOSS development model — but with a critical edition: The return of #openprocess, something we’ve lost over the last 10 years due to the shift from public email archives to our reliance on encrypted chat.

With this in mind, what is still #blocking the #openweb reboot? One thing I’ve learned from the last five years of this reboot is this: The #geekproblem is inadequate for the scale of change and challenge we face. Currently, the #geekproblem is HARD #blocking, obstructing both, funding, and tech direction. Think: #NLNet, #NGIZero, #SummerOfProtocols, #InvestInOpen — they say the right words, have potential, but are actually #blindly caught in a loop of the same limiting #blocking patterns.

This is why we need activism, this can be #spiky, sometimes all it takes Is a rock or a stick. Think of Greek shepherd dogs in the mountains — they come at you like wolves. But just bending down to pick up a rock or stick? They back off. No violence. Just clarity and intention. Think of the #4opens like this when facing #mainstreaming, suddenly, it starts to make sense.

Nuts and nutters, Yes — you’re right, this can sound like blinded ideology. But remember: Humans are meaning-creating creatures. One word for that is ideology — there are others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synonym

If we can compost this mess, that’s a big if, will the #OMN Work? Simple answer: Yes.
Complex answer: No. My answer to that riddle? We find the complex by implementing the simple. That’s the #KISS principle in action. Walk the simple path, we discover our way through the complex path by implementing and walking the simple one #KISS.

#Mainstreaming = #Deathcult Worship

Most mainstream agendas are pointless. Why? Because they’re built on “common sense” — Which today often just means #deathcult worship. Something to keep in mind… whenever you’re doing anything that matters. Hope this slight poetry piece helps. One thing I keep saying, please don’t be a prat, thanks.

News, the signal-to-noise mess

Almost all our posting in the #openweb and in the #dotcons in response to #mainstreaming news is noise. It’s reactive, fragmented, performative. We scroll, we rage, we boost, we dunk, but we don’t build. Sometimes, someone posts something thoughtful, something deep, meaningful. But it vanishes in the churn. The system is designed this way.

Even on our #openweb, where we have more autonomy, we are mirroring this spectacle path, feeding it attention, reposting its narratives, amplifying its framing. In the mess of this world, our timelines become echo chambers of secondhand despair and outrage. In short, we’re still speaking their language, on their terms, with their tools.

Why? Because we haven’t (re)built a place for real signal yet. The #OMN (Open Media Network), is a push to shift this dynamic. It’s not about broadcasting noise slightly more ethically. It’s about creating new spaces entirely, where the roots of stories matter more than the spin, where the focus is on shared compost rather than hot takes, where people and community are producers, and where signal isn’t just a flash, but a ongoing process.

The current state of the web, especially under the domination of the #dotcons, is colonized communication. It rewards (stupid)individualism, immediacy, virality. It buries context, nuance, history. It’s a structure that #blocks liberation because it’s built to sell alienation back to us, one like or scroll, on click at a time.

Even the current #openweb reboot, for all its potential, reproduces these patterns, because we carry them with us. We don’t just need alternatives in name, we need alternative cultures, processes, and values. We need to compost the mess, the #techshit, and grow new paths from the decay. That’s what the #OMN is seeded to do.

But let’s be honest, we’re not there yet. And we won’t get there unless we start collectively focusing on building signal, not just yelling about the noise. The tools need to be #KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), the governance needs to be transparent, trust-based, and the tech has to get out of the way, not be the centre. This requires stepping away from the #geekproblem, the cult of control, complexity, and abstraction, and towards living, messy, grassroots cultures that prioritize access, action, and accountability.

The mainstream is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. That collapse is not the revolution. What grows next is.

#OMN #OGB #4opens #openweb #geekproblem #deathcult #nothingnew #buildalternatives #grassroots #trustbasedgovernance

Take media coverage of protests as an example. It’s always framed through the lens of disruption and spectacle, “violent clashes,” “unrest,” “inconvenience to commuters” rather than the systemic injustices that birthed the protest in the first place. The message from the #mainstreaming is clear: “Why can’t you express your anger in a way that’s easier for us to ignore?” This is not journalism, it’s narrative policing. It flattens struggle into caricature and erases the causes: the exploitation, the dispossession, the broken promises. This is normal when we have media infrastructure of our own. Without projects like #indymediaback to hold space for grounded, first-voice storytelling, all we get is the echo of power describing its own reflection.

Mainstreaming: Building Grassroots Balance

Our history of involvement in #EU digital outreach and policy meetings has made one thing starkly clear, our #openweb is deeply entangled in the process of #mainstreaming, a messy, often co-optive dynamic where grassroots voices are softened, diluted, and redirected into bureaucracy, then in the end they are simply #blocked. Yes, while there is value in taking part, it’s also a wake-up call.

The push to shape digital paths from above is strong. But without active grassroots alternatives, there will be no balance that is needed. The building of a so-called “commons” is reshaped to fit into #NGO boxes, filled with #dotcons-friendly language, and stripped of any radical potential. This is why our #openweb projects now matter more than ever.

At the heart of this approach must be #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) in both technology and user experience. We don’t need more convoluted tools or platforms weighed down by geek prestige. We need simple, effective frameworks and networks that allow users-as-producers to build the social complexity on their own terms. Complexity should come from people, not code.

And this brings us to the elephant in the room, the #geekproblem. Our own grassroots digital spaces are still shaped by a narrow, deterministic culture that lacks wider social understanding. In the path we need to be on, we cannot code our way to liberation if the ideology behind the code is warped, and currently, it is. As we often say: all code is ideology solidified, and it has real social effects.

Right now, way too much of that ideology stems from the #deathcult, hidden behind kind words, progressive branding, and empty buzzwords. This disconnect between stated values and real-world outcomes is dangerous, and disturbingly common.

This is why we’re pushing the #OGB, an online Open Governance Body for the #fediverse and beyond. Built around the #4opens and grounded in social paths, the OGB is designed to be a real voice for grassroots communities. It’s an open project, a no-permissions outreach tool, use it if you find value in it.

We’re currently looking for funding support and collaborators, particularly developers who are attracted to this vision. If you have links, networks, or skills to offer, get in touch.

The time is urgent. The mainstreaming machine is rolling forward. Let’s compost the #techshit, reclaim our spaces, and grow better from the bottom up.