In our worship of the #deathcult, if you strip away the robes, chants, and charismatic leaders, what remains is behaviour, not belief. A destructive cult is not defined by how strange it sounds, but by what it does to bodies, lives, and futures. This matters because it breaks a common illusion: cults are judged by outcomes, not vibes.
So the real question for our #mainstreaming culture is simple: does this system produce harm through deliberate collective action? If the answer is yes, then whatever it calls itself – religion, nation, corporation, ideology – it is functioning as a destructive cult. Scale does not absolve cult behaviour. One of the biggest blocks to clear thinking is the assumption that cults are small or fringe. History shows the opposite: the most destructive cults are large, normalised, institutional, and framed as “common sense”.
When harm is routinised, bureaucratised, and abstracted, people stop recognising it as cult behaviour. Violence becomes “policy”. Death becomes an “externality”. Injury becomes a “necessary sacrifice”. This is why the #deathcult framing lands so sharply – it cuts through the language that hides responsibility.
Seen this way, our current #mainstreaming clearly qualifies. It knowingly produces mass injury and death, continues despite overwhelming evidence of harm, treats that harm as acceptable or unavoidable, and disciplines or excludes those who challenge its logic. At that point, it meets the functional definition of a destructive cult.
The justification doesn’t matter – profit, security, growth, markets, “realism”, inevitability. The outcomes are the same: climate collapse, preventable poverty, war, border violence, structural neglect. All normalised. All defended. All repeated. This is not accidental; it is deliberate action within a shared belief system.
People resist this #KISS framing because calling a system a cult feels offensive. It threatens identity, exposes complicity, and removes the comfort of neutrality. So instead, people argue about tone, civility, process, or “both sides”. These debates avoid the harder question: what are we part of that is actively harming people, and why do we keep participating?
This connects directly to the #OMN project. The Open Media Network is not about labelling individuals as evil. It is about withdrawing legitimacy from systems that normalise harm, and rebuilding media and social infrastructure that makes harm visible, allows challenge without erasure, documents action rather than just opinion, and restores collective memory.
When journalism collapses into PR and outrage, cults thrive. When media becomes operational again, cult logic weakens. The uncomfortable truth is that destructive cults are not defeated by exposing hypocrisy, debating beliefs, policing language, or demanding safety from discomfort. They are defeated by refusing participation, building parallel systems, making outcomes visible, and acting collectively outside their framing.
That is not comfortable. It is not safe. But it is how people stop being members of something that kills – and why the #deathcult framing matters.
Let’s be honest about something we usually skate around. Many of our #fluffy activist friends are not fighting for change. They are fighting for equality of access to the existing system. That system is the #deathcult – growth, extraction, hierarchy, control – and most progressive mainstream activism is about making that worship fairer, nicer, more inclusive. More seats in the temple, better language on the altar, safer rituals for those already kneeling. This is not transformation, it is managed inclusion.
And yes, this work can have real, immediate value for people suffering now. That matters. But we need to stop pretending it is the same thing as change and challenge. Equality within a system is not the same as escaping the system.
Most #mainstreaming activism, accepts capitalism as inevitable, state power as the horizon, extraction as the price of living, climate collapse as something to be “managed”, this leads them to except platforms, NGOs, and institutions as arbiters of legitimacy. Then the limit is to ask politely for representation, protections, funding, visibility. This is reformist harm reduction, not the liberation we need. We need to say this out loud, more, because this “confusion” currently is #blocking real alternatives. When people who want out are constantly blindly told to slow down, be safer, be nicer, be more legible, be more fundable, the result is paralysis.
The #OMN path is not about polishing this mess, or making oppression more diverse, it’s in no way about optimising injustice. It’s about walking out of the temple, even when that feels irresponsible, unsafe, or unrealistic.
This Is where the friction comes from: pushing for messy governance and mediation instead of blocking, use-value over branding, affinity over scale, action over commentary. We are simply refusing to confuse survival within the system with escape from it. That refusal makes people uncomfortable – especially those whose activism is already recognised, funded and socially rewarded.
A simple test: Ask this of any project, campaign, or platform – Does this help people stop worshipping the #deathcult? Or does it help them worship it more safely? If the answer is the second, be honest about it, don’t lie by call it radical, don’t call it transformative, don’t call it challenge. Be honest, call it what it is, continuity, for all our sakes we need to say this clearly, even if it costs social comfort.
Because real change and challenge has always been unpopular – especially with those most invested in making the current mess feel livable.
We need to balance this mess – a diversity of agendas ≠ winner-takes-all politics. Different projects are based on different agendas – and that diversity is not a weakness, it’s a survival trait. Winner-takes-all politics (electoral, market, platform, narrative) flattens this into a single metric of success: scale, growth, legitimacy, dominance. That logic is a social and ecological disaster, as it pushes everything toward monoculture, and monocultures always collapse.
The mistake is assuming that coordination requires uniformity – it doesn’t – what it requires is tolerance of difference plus shared boundaries. This is what “diversity of tactics” originally meant before it was watered down into a slogan. This is why: “acceptable rebels” are celebrated after they succeed, “useful weirdos” are allowed once they prove value to the system, everyone else gets disciplined, marginalised, or erased.
But what really matters is social context, not the tool. The problem now is that: individual self-destructiveness has scaled up, systems amplify harm faster than reflection, ecosystems are the casualty. This is why “just let people choose” no longer works, choice without structure leads to collapse.
In this mess, the #stupidindividualism reaction of #blocking is just displaced survival energy, blocking energy that takes up the space that needs to be filled with creativity. Blocking is not strength, it’s defensive overload.
In most cases, blocking emerges from damaged or threatened sense of self, lack of any working mediation structures leading to fear of being overwhelmed or erased. This happens when people don’t trust processes, they rely instead on hard personal boundaries, then when people don’t trust themselves, they externalise control.
#Blocking becomes a way to regain agency, stop cognitive overload, avoid unresolved conflict and preserve identity under pressure. It’s not a moral failure, as much as a systemic trauma response. But it is also creativity-killing.
Why blocking scales and creativity doesn’t. Blocking scales easily: fast, binary, emotionally satisfying, requires no social labour. Where creativity is slow: relational, risky, ambiguous and requires trust and time. So in high-stress environments, #blocking wins by default. This is why systems that rely on blocking alone cannot generate alternatives, they only fragment.
A weak sense of self? Yes, but it’s socially produced, not individual pathology, it’s produced by: platform hostility, collapse of community memory, loss of intergenerational skill transfer, constant precarity leading to only performative politics replacing any lived practice.
People are asked to be everything – safe, radical, inclusive, legible, pure – with no tools like the #OMN to manage contradiction. Blocking becomes the last remaining control lever.
In this mess, how do we communicate “diversity of tactics”? Not only as tolerance, as ideology, but more usefully as infrastructure like the #OMN projects which have soft boundaries before hard ones, based on affinity as much as agreement, you don’t need shared beliefs to work together, you need shared purpose locally.
This leads to the uncomfortable truth, that creativity doesn’t emerge from safety, it emerges from bounded risk. Too much danger = collapse. Too much safety = stagnation. What we have too much of today is safety theatre covering structural fear. The path out of this is that people need to develop a stronger, not weaker, sense of self, one that can survive disagreement without disappearing. That’s the real work.
Meany people lazily see “the Right” in America as a unified political movement, but this is simplistic, comforting fiction. People still see as “normal” what we used to have, an orthodox worship of a #deathcult. But this is tired path is now being overwhelmed by a hard right (populist) rejection, and to add to this mess, this reaction is it itself is captured by meany personal grabs for power and statues, yes it truly is a mess.
We need to look at this, it matters, because treating the Right as a monolith is not only lazy analysis – it’s politically disabling. You can’t challenge what you don’t understand, and you can’t build alternatives if you mistake coalitions for any clear ideologies. Let’s look at the hard right shift as a wider picture, there are meany factions with strong opinions, incompatible paths, and occasional fistfights, all forced to share one centralised path.
So let’s break the myths. On the current hard right, the #GOP Is no longer a party – it’s a reactionary mess. America’s winner-take-all electoral system forces narrowly different ideologies into just two viable parties. With the end of the post-war cross-party worship, this means seeding coalitions, without any coherence.
The Republican Party is not one belief system. It is a structural compromise between factions that actively hate each other, held together by access to power, donor money, media ecosystems and, increasingly, one man’s delusional personality. Let’s draft 4 of these original Republican tribes, who existed long before Trump arrived, the old #GOP.
Faith & Flag Conservatives
These are your Bible-first, America-second, Bible-third conservatives. They are blindly religious (mostly white evangelicals), hardline on abortion, LGBTQ rights, and “traditional values”, comfortable with militarism when framed as spiritual warfare and intensely pro-Trump, despite his… everything. If this faction were a brand, the slogan would be: “God Bless America – and Also, Just God. Mostly God.”
Populist Right
These are the “working-class guys yelling about globalists” conservatives. Who are fiercely anti-immigration, deeply anti-elite (except their elitists), surprisingly open to taxing the rich and regulating corporations, adjacent to conspiracy culture, even when they deny it. Their core contradiction is incoherence, they demand the return of factory jobs… while shouting about it on TikTok, filmed on an iPhone, manufactured in Shenzhen.
Committed Conservatives
These are the pre-Trump Republicans who survived the Trump madness turn. They are the original priests of the #deathcult: Pro-business, pro-free trade, anti-regulation, hawkish on foreign policy, Their loyalty is to tax cuts above all human needs. This is the GOP of donors, boardrooms, and polite dinner parties. The old power politics, before grievance, became the primary organising principle of the party.
The Ambivalent Right
These are the “I’m conservative, but not like… that” crowd. They tend to be younger, economically conservative, socially more moderate, Trump-curious but not Trump-devotional. They listen to Jordan Peterson, think universal healthcare “sounds chill,” have a gay friend. Think old school yuppie who don’t want to be left-wing. So they drift.
Then Trump arrived in the this establishment temple and overturned the altar. As we can see he didn’t create these factions, he used them, rearranged them, amplified some, sidelined others, and glued the whole mess together with charisma, grievance, and constant conflict.
From this mess grew the current more fascist path:
#MAGA Populists, the dominant force, who are aggressively anti-immigration, obsessed with tariffs, convinced the system is rigged, immersed in right-wing media, personally loyal to Trump, not policies. Their political theory is simple and old school: “Build the wall, raise the tariffs, and arrest somebody.”
Traditional republicans, Country Club crew who hate tariffs, love tax cuts, want cheap immigrant labour (quietly), prefer predictable imperialism to Trump’s mess. They have donor money, which is why they still exist – despite being constantly bullied by MAGA influencers.
Small-Government Conservatives / Fiscal Hawks are the old priests of the #deathcult. Libertarian wonks who obsess over deficits, hate government spending (unless it’s police or military), are split between isolationism and aggressive war fantasies, believe every problem can be solved by cutting one more department. They’ve been angry about taxes since birth and plan to die that way.
Religious Right who politically weaponised churches. They on the up, got Roe overturned, want a national abortion ban, believe God has a detailed policy platform. Trump frustrates them because he’s useful, not righteous.
The latecomers, the #Techbro billionaires, who shifted from the centre right of the Democrats to the Trump overnight. This happened as the government started sniffing about braking up their #dotcons empires. They want zero regulation, treat “free speech” as algorithmic advantage, oppose immigration except for high-skill visas, increasingly believe AI they control should replace democracy. Are fetishising fascism. This is not a mass movement – just billionaires and their fanboys discovering culture war leverage.
MAHA + Newly Converted Democrats – Make America Healthy Again – Wellness culture meets conspiracy nut jobs. They “care” about: Food chemicals, vaccines, chronic illness and “Medical freedom.” They arrived via RFK and pandemic brain damage. They’re not permanent Republicans – they’re politically unmoored and emotionally primed.
This coalition Is always fighting because they fundamentally disagree on almost everything: Tariffs: MAGA loves them, donors hate them. Immigration: Business wants workers, MAGA wants deportations. Abortion: Religious Right wants bans, Trump wants what ever keeps him in office and out of jail. Foreign policy: Hawks want wars, MAGA wants spectacle. AI: Tech Right wants no rules, voters are terrified. The is no ideological unity, it’s a messianic conflict, held together by personality and lust for power. As should be clear, the right mess is no monolith, and it has meany questionable expiration dates.
To have any hope of composting this mess, we need to understand factions not with empathy, but as, openings for change and challenge, it’s about moving past contradictions, and fault lines. Let’s not pretend otherwise, we need to not keep losing to this kinda mess which, currently, ignores us and keeps working no matter how bad it gets because it understands fragmentation very well – and works to exploit it ruthlessly.
Where is the progressive left? We need to do better #KISS
Have you noticed how, over the last few decades, many sentences are repeated so often they start to become “common sense”? “You need to love yourself” is one of these, it sounds harmless, kind, even progressive. But this sentence didn’t only reshape how we feel about ourselves – it reshapes how the economy works. This is a story about how “self-esteem” become an engine of #stupidindividualism, that helped produce the explosion of inequality and mess we now live inside.
Today, self-esteem is treated as a universal good. The cure for anxiety, failure, loneliness, precarity. If you’re struggling, the message is simple: look inward. Fix yourself. Believe harder. And that’s the trick, this isn’t about telling people to hate themselves. It’s about noticing that something deeply political has been smuggled into something that looks purely personal.
For most of human history, self-esteem wasn’t a virtue, it was a vice. Across Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, pride was seen as dangerous. The seed of arrogance, ignorance, suffering. Fulfilment came from humility, mutual obligation, and limits, not self-celebration. The very idea of “loving yourself” would have sounded morally wrong, not empowering. So how did pride get rebranded as progress?
In part this is a #geekproblem, in an industrialising world obsessed with measurement: output per worker, profit per hour, value per share. Humans were no longer judged by moral contribution, but by performance, self-esteem quietly became an economic variable.
Drum roll – we had the #neoliberal turn – market ideology glorifies selfishness, despises solidarity, and frames empathy as weakness. This mess was used to increase the push for common sense #mainstreaming heroes to be lone geniuses, the media meme helped to drive the invisible destruction of any shared social structures. Then helped to obfuscate when western economies dismantling welfare states, deregulating markets, outsourcing industrial labour and rebranding citizens as entrepreneurs of the self. This was not a coincidence.
With this ideological turn, structural problems were redefined as personal psychological failures. If you’re poor, anxious, unemployed – the problem isn’t the system – it’s your mindset. This become self-esteem as labour discipline. As blue-collar work paths closed and white-collar “service” work expanded, confidence became currency, not skill, care or competence.
To day in the daily grind, work rewards presentation, persuasion, and performance. Self-esteem became professional armour. Bragging outperformed quiet skill. Selling yourself matters more than doing the work. This is where #stupidindividualism hardens:
Success looks personal
Failure looks personal
Solidarity disappears
Power becomes invisible
Outside the office – consumerism becomes about buying self-worth. Advertising doesn’t sell products. It sells reassurance. A handbag isn’t a bag, a car isn’t transport, a platform isn’t communication. They’re proof that you matter, until the next upgrade. Self-esteem – the kind that depends on validation, status, and visibility – is never satisfied, which makes it incredibly profitable. Self-esteem becomes something you only can rent from the market.
Then we have the rule of the #nastyfew, the #CEO as narcissist-priest. Research shows corporate leadership selects for narcissistic traits: grandiosity, risk-taking, obsession with image, contempt for limits. These “leaders” chase metrics that look like success – stock price, media praise, personal compensation – while hollowing out organisations and communities we need to live and push the change and challenge we need in the era of #climatchaos and social break down. In this mess, confidence replaces accountability, performance replaces reality. Collapse soon follows.
In this mess, the easy to understand #KISS lie is that the quiet violence of the self-esteem ideology tells people to solve systemic harm as only personal feelings. It tells us to love ourselves inside conditions designed to grind us down. This is why self-esteem culture is the drug feeding us precarious work, algorithmic management, influencer economies and endless competition. It makes people blame themselves instead of the structures exploiting them.
What we can do – the #OMNhashtag story names this as #stupidindividualism: Radical inwardness paired with radical powerlessness, emotional self-management instead of collective change, narcissism dressed up as empowerment. That self-esteem like this is divorced from community, becomes a control system.
So, to say again, get off your knees, we don’t need more self-love slogans, we need shared power where native paths are about confidence that does not come from mainstreaming affirmations, rather from shared competence, mutual aid and belonging.
The project we need, the #OMN is not about polishing the self, instead it is a path to rebuild the commons which “self-esteem” was used to dismantle. So please stop worshipping yourself, start standing with others, this is how we compost this mess.
Don’t worry too much, the corporate world has solutions, we look here at #ESG which stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. Its advocates say that if companies disclose enough data about their environmental and social behaviour, “good” corporate conduct will be rewarded by investors with higher share prices.
Let’s really look at #ESG, for what they are, #greenwash, a system of delay, distraction, and capture – on this #deatcult path this it is not a mistake, it is a function. The green halo on the same old shit, #mainstreaming sustainability has always been a corporate scam. Much less “green transition” more global polycrisis. Climate breakdown, ecological collapse, rising inequality – all accelerating.
The market, once again, is meant to save us. So what happened next was predictable. A sewage flow of private ESG frameworks spread across the corporate world. None issued by public bodies. None democratically accountable. All vague, inconsistent, and easily gamed. Companies can score highly on ESG while: Exploiting workers, running unsafe workplaces, destroying ecosystems and locking in fossil fuel dependency
How? It’s the normal mainstream economics, counting the wrong things. Employee cycling schemes, wellbeing surveys, diversity, trivial “green” initiatives. Meanwhile, any real structural harm is ignored. Companies can claim to be “100% renewable” by buying Renewable Energy Certificates (#REC) – while still running entirely on fossil-fuel electricity. This #greenwash is not broken – It’s working, but the grassroots question is for whom? It is not environmentalism, to see it clearly, it’s risk management for capital.
One fluffy/spiky path to fixing this is composting the consultancies who market themselves as climate saviours while simultaneously advising coal, oil, and gas firms on “upstream optimisation” – which is consultant-speak for extract more, faster.
There is a lot to compost, our “progressive” institutions are captured, The UN climate summits (#COPs) are crawling with these consultants. At COP28, the talks were presided over by the head of a state oil company. McKinsey, a big consultancy company, “advised” the process – while simultaneously serving the world’s biggest fossil fuel producers. This isn’t failure, it’s corruption, regulatory capture in public view.
Then we have the “investment”, magical thinking for grown adults. Carbon offsets are sold as a way to “neutralise” emissions. When in practice few if any reduce emissions, what they do is allow corporations to continue polluting while outsourcing guilt. And yes – the same eco parasites, consultancies, helped design the metrics that made this scam possible.
All the mess is a delay infrastructure that does not exist to solve climate change. It exists to slow real regulation, displace political action, convert existential crisis into financial products and keep power exactly where it is. This is why projects like #ESG are voluntary, private, fragmented, and endlessly technical. Complexity is not a bug – it’s the shield.
So back to the subject of this site – what #OMN calls signal – is grassroots journalism that does not only ask: “How can companies do better?” But focus on: Who benefits? Who decides? Who profits from delay? Who pays the price, and what power structures remain untouched?
And the answer to this is not complex, it’s the mess we live in. Which can be #KISS solved by breaking the power of the institutions that caused it. The example we talk about here #ESG is capitalism blessing itself in public. A ritual, a distraction, The priesthood of consultants chanting metrics while the planet burns.
To put this simply, if “sustainability” is filtered through profit first, it is not sustainability, it’s more lies we are being asked to kneel before, more #deathcult we all need to stop worshipping. So get up, pick up a shovel, there’s a lot of composting to do.
People keep asking the same question, because daily life keeps getting harder: Why is everything so expensive? Why is everyone so stressed? Why does it feel like the economy is rigged?
The short answer is – it is – The longer answer matters, because this didn’t happen by accident. For most of human history, wealth inequality was brutal. A tiny elitist crew owned almost everything, and most people lived short, precarious lives. That only changed briefly, and recently.
The Post-war exception (1945–1975). After World War II, something unusual happened. Governments become in part democratic, and with the balance of the Cold War, remembered what economic collapse leads to: fascism, war, and social breakdown. So they built a tightly regulated global economic system designed to keep things boringly stable. This was the Bretton Woods system.
Currencies were fixed. Banks were regulated. Capital was controlled. Unions were strong. Taxes on the rich were high – often 90%+ on top incomes and inheritances. And this worked from 1945 to the early 1970s. Wages rose with productivity, housing was affordable, one income could support a family, inequality fell, a broad middle class emerged. This wasn’t the “free market”. It was the opposite. It was embedded liberalism – markets contained by society, not the other way around.
The Crisis of the 1970s was when the system hit its limits. The US stopped running trade surpluses. The #coldwar drained resources, oil shocks sent inflation soaring. The Bretton Woods system collapsed in 1971. By the mid-1970s, the global economy was in stagflation: high inflation, high unemployment, low growth. For ordinary people, life got harder. For the #nastyfew elitists, something else happened. Their share of national income – quietly shrinking since the 1940s – suddenly mattered again. When growth slowed, they could no longer tolerate workers getting a larger slice of the pie.
This was the moment they chose #neoliberal counter-revolution, this wasn’t spontaneous, it was planned. Corporations funded think tanks, media narratives were reshaped, universities were targeted. Politics was captured from the inside. Business needed to seize cultural, political, and ideological power.
Thatcher, Reagan wasn’t neutral “economic science”, they were populist #classwar. Labour lost bargaining power, capital regained it. The tools of the post-war order were put to use – The IMF used debt crises to force austerity and privatization on the Global South, whole countries were stripped of economic sovereignty, poverty and inequality exploded. This was accumulation by dispossession – old colonial extraction, updated for financial capitalism.
Thatcher and Reagan:
Broke unions through force and law
Slashed taxes on the rich
Deregulated finance
Privatized public assets
Redefined government as the enemy
From this point on, productivity rose, but wages stopped. The new normal is ownership over work, it’s the world we live in now.
Housing treated as an investment, not a home
Wages stagnating while CEO pay explodes
Finance dominating the real economy
Debt disciplining both workers and nations
“Market logic” replacing democracy
This is not failure, it is success, for the people who pushed it. We now have 40 years of #mainstreaming to shift and compost.
Why this matters for us, and why the #OMN projects matter for you. Media matters, #mainstreaming journalism, always reports within this system. It speaks truth from power – explaining, managing, normalising. What we need is grassroots journalism that speaks truth to power. We need more signal, and less noise in our own media. This signal asks: Who benefits? Who decides? Who pays? What was deliberately dismantled? What can be rebuilt – differently?
The native #openweb#OMN path is not about fixing the worship of the market. It’s about walking out of the temple. This economy was designed. That means it can be redesigned. But not by begging. Not by rearranging seats, and not by pretending this mess is accidental.
So if you want to help make one of this missing piler of society work, then #KISS get up, pick up a shovel, start composting the shite pile. That’s where new growth comes from.
Both “great leaders” and shared governance can rot, nothing is pure. Leader-centric / “#stupidindividualism” – can work, strong individual leadership can produce positive outcomes, this path is strong when early-stage projects need speed and coherence, moments of crisis where coordination matters more than deliberation, visionary synthesis when no shared language exists yet. Historically, many projects only exist because one or two people pushed through inertia. That’s real.
The benefit is clarity, momentum, and decision velocity. The cost is hidden, deferred, and structural. Leader-centric systems rot, almost always fail in predictable ways: succession failure (what happens when the leader burns out, dies, or changes?), myth-making replaces accountability, disagreement becomes personal betrayal, values drift accelerates once scale or money enters. This rot is catastrophic, everything looks fine until it suddenly isn’t.
Shared governance and open process has other failure modes, it fails differently. When shared governance works there is a shared direction even if there’s disagreement on method, people accept unfinishedness, trust precedes rules, power is treated as something to circulate, not hoard. This is why federated systems work better than monoliths, they don’t need everyone aligned – they need enough alignment locally.
How shared governance rots is about noise, mismatched visions, process fetishism, endless discussion with no production. This is rot by dilution, not domination. The distinction is that shared governance doesn’t fail because there’s too much democracy. It fails because there’s no gardening. The compost metaphor isn’t only poetic – it’s operational, compost is not “anything goes”. Compost works because: inputs are constrained, time matters, turning matters, bad material is broken down, not allowed to dominate
In social paths composting means that bad ideas aren’t banned, but they’re depowered, noise isn’t amplified, conflict is metabolised, not performed, unfinished work is expected, not punished. This is where most “open” projects fail, they open input, but never govern flow.
Does this scale? Or does attention rot it? Attention always brings rot, there is no version of scale that doesn’t attract: careerists, ideology tourists, control-seekers, people looking for identity rather than contribution. The mistake is thinking you can prevent this, you can’t. What you can do is design for survivable rot. OMN’s approach (and similar paths) assume rot is inevitable, conflict is normal, bad faith is periodic, misunderstanding is constant
So instead of prevention, you build filters, loose coupling (people can leave without damage), low barrier to exit, moderate barrier to influence, contribution > opinion, process over charisma, forks are allowed, capture is not
This is why tone is not neutral – it acts as a filter, hostility, and “scaring away the right people” is an issue that deserves honesty. Yes – some good people are put off by sharp language, that’s real, I’ve seen it happen. But the uncomfortable truth is learned the hard way, softening tone attracts more people early, but it attracts the wrong power dynamics later. In long-running projects, the people who demand comfort early often become blockers later, demand control when disagreement arises, moralise process instead of doing work, then collapse when ambiguity appears.
Sharp language is not about anger, it’s about boundary-setting in advance. If someone can’t get past discomfort, they usually can’t handle the needed path of unfinished systems, horizontal accountability, slow value emergence and loss of status metrics This is not elitism – it’s pattern recognition over decades.
Then there is the question of funding, survival, and eating while resisting capture, people need to live. Some distilled lesson from examples:
Externally funded projects scale fast and lose mission fast
Self-funded projects keep integrity and burn out
Volunteer-only projects are fragile to conflict
Career-based projects become platforms, not commons
There is no clean solution, the OMN’s wager is not “no money forever”. It’s, no money before governance, no scale before culture, no funding without exit paths. Most projects reverse this order and die because of it. Why this looks vague (and why that’s not a bug) is that cultural infrastructure cannot be fully specified in advance without killing it. If it could, corporations would already own it.
The #OMN path is not a product, not a pitch, not a platform. It’s a set of constraints and practices that allow people to build things that don’t immediately collapse into hierarchy or careerism. That’s why it reads as incomplete, why it frustrates optimisation instincts, why it can survive longer than most projects.
The real trade-off:
Individual-led systems fail spectacularly
Shared systems fail invisibly
Soft systems fail by capture
Hard systems fail by fracture
#OMN is choosing a failure mode that is: slow, repairable, forkable and survivable. It’s not idealism, it’s engineering with human materials. It’s a path not for everyone, it never is, and doesn’t need to be. What is needed is enough people who understand why mess, slowness, and friction are features, not bugs – and who are willing to keep turning the compost instead of demanding a finished product.
Most progressive #mainstreaming isn’t about ending the #deathcult – it’s about making its worship feel more fair, more inclusive, more polite. There is some real everyday value in this. Fewer people get crushed immediately, some suffering is reduced, that matters.
But let’s be honest about what it does not do, it does not get people off their knees to challenge the altar to stop the sacrifice. It rearranges the seating in the temple, feeding the deeper problem, obedience. Progressive mainstreaming accepts the frame, accepts the metrics, accepts the economy of extraction and then argues about distribution. It negotiates better terms with a machine that is killing us. That is not transformation, it’s managed decline.
The project of real change and challenge – the work the #OMN exists for – starts somewhere else entirely. It starts with people standing up and walking away. Walking out of the temple of the #deathcult we all live in, not in purity, utopia or comfort. But into mess, cooperation, unfinished tools, shared risk, and actual agency. This isn’t about better policies inside the system. It’s about building outside it, under it, alongside it – until the system hollowed itself out and no longer matters.
It’s about people picking up shovels, composting the wreckage, and growing something that can actually sustain life. This is simplicity #KISS#OMN
We have already seen the failures: lived through #Indymedia, the #NGO turn, the #dotcons capture, the #Fediverse repeating old mistakes. When we talk about #OMN, we’re trying to stop people from re-learning the same lessons by losing again. Silence would be complicity.
The #OMN is where critique becomes agency. It’s not about “promoting a project”, if we don’t talk about this without something like #OMN, critique collapses into doom, aesthetics, or personal exits. #OMN is a way to, act collectively, without lying about power, money, or governance.
Forgetting is how capture happens, the moment people stop naming alternatives, the space fills with managerial language, funding logic, and fear-based control. We talk about #OMN to keep the space open enough for something human to grow.
The #OMN is a path that resists #stupidindividualism, where most contemporary “solutions” reinforce isolation, personal brands, and individual safety strategies. #OMN starts from the assumption that survival and meaning are collective. We need to keep talking about this because almost nobody else does.
It’s unfinished – and that matters. It’s not about defending a polished system, instead, it’s about holding open a process. Talking about #OMN is how we invite others into the compost rather than presenting them with a finished product to consume.
We talk about #OMN because it’s a native way of saying: “We don’t have to repeat this. We can build differently, together, if we remember what already worked.”*
It’s not evangelism, it’s stewardship.
A few of us have been working on real, positive, horizontal social and technological solutions for over twenty years. Not hypotheticals, not vibes, things that actually work.
We know they work locally, we know they work socially. And after more than a decade building on the #fediverse, we know they can work in tech, at scale without going vertical, corporate, or authoritarian.
This isn’t speculative any more. Our creative task now – the #nothingnew work – is simply to combine what already works: Horizontal social practice, federated #openweb tech, trust-based governance. We already have a slate of projects waiting to be built: #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback and #makinghistory. What’s missing is not ideas, it is people willing to show up and implement.
And here’s the hard truth: every time we try to talk about radical or progressive language, power, or structure, people retreat into #blocking and ignoring. The same unresolved tensions get replayed endlessly, nothing is mediated, nothing is grounded. Bad will accumulates, the social commons rots.
This rot isn’t accidental – it’s structural – To work our way out of this mess, we need both #fluff and #spiky. We need broad categories to think clearly, the #mainstreaming#fashernista rejection of this isn’t sophistication – it’s submission. It’s a soft, polite form of #deathcult worship.
You don’t dismantle a #deathcult by being nicer to it, you dismantle it by stopping your participation and building something better.
So this is the question, not rhetorical, not theoretical: Are you going to help make this happen? Are you going to pick up a shovel? Or are you going to stay on your knees, arguing about tone while the ground burns?
On the #OMN and #openweb paths, when I talk about not being a “prat”, am not talking about a personal insult in the everyday sense, I am naming a pattern of behaviour that actively blocks collective work, let’s be explicit. A prat is someone who:
Performs critique instead of doing the work
They talk about problems endlessly but won’t touch the shovel. They judge seeds for not being trees. They dismiss unfinished work while contributing nothing usable themselves. This isn’t accountability – it’s avoidance dressed as intelligence.
Defaults to vertical thinking in horizontal spaces
They try to manage, gatekeep, or “correct” instead of co-creating. In #OMN terms, this is importing #dotcons logic into open systems.
Treats values as weapons, not commitments
They quote rules, codes, or ideals to hit people with, not to strengthen the commons or protect the vulnerable. A code of conduct, used this way, becomes a club. The prat believes they’re being ethical – while undermining ethics in practice.
Confuses identity with contribution
They think being right, being radical, or being aligned is more important than building something that works. This is #fashionista behaviour: aesthetic politics, purity signalling, zero tolerance for mess.
Can’t handle undefined space
They panic when things aren’t: Finished, branded, institutionally sanctioned, measurable in platform metrics. Because #openweb work is by nature undefined, they respond with fear, defensiveness, or hostility. This is where “VERY negative when challenged” shows up.
Redirects anger
Their frustration is often justified, but it gets aimed at: Other builders, messy experiments, imperfect allies. Instead of: Centralized power, enclosure, #dotcons capture, #deathcult economics. This is how movements eat themselves.
What “prat” does not mean
It does not mean: Someone asking honest questions, someone disagreeing in good faith, someone making mistakes, someone learning in public. Mess, failure, argument is allowed. Blocking isn’t.
Why this matters
The #openweb only exists if people are free to: Start badly, iterate publicly, cooperate loosely, build trust over time. Prat behaviour shuts this down by: Discouraging participation, freezing experimentation, replacing process with performance. That’s why we say it plainly, not to shame – but to clear the path.
If you’re not helping build, not helping others build, not protecting the space for building. Then stop throwing rocks, pick up a shovel, or step aside. That’s what we mean by “don’t be a prat” on the #OMN and #openweb paths.
Calls for #degrowth are becoming unavoidable, because the facts are unavoidable. We are in ecological overshoot. We have consumed too many resources and produced too much waste. #Climatechaos and social breakdown with collapsing biodiversity are not side effects, they are #KISS signals that the system is very out of balance.
Degrowth is not primarily a population problem, it is an overconsumption problem, concentrated in the global North and among the wealthy everywhere. How we talk about degrowth matters, some framings slip quickly from ecological limits into dangerous territory. Phrases like “the population needs to fall below two billion” are intended as ecological realism, but historically and politically they have horrific baggage. The idea of “surplus population” has always been used to justify violence against those least responsible for growth and extraction. It slides far too easily into genocidal thinking, even when that is not the speaker’s intent.
That is an ethical failure, not a rhetorical quibble. There is solid research – from Hickel and others – showing that it is technically possible to provide everyone on the planet with a humane standard of living using perhaps 30% of current global energy and material throughput, if resources are distributed differently and wasteful consumption is cut at the top.
This matters because it shifts the problem from how many people exist to how systems are organised. That doesn’t mean population decline is irrelevant. An honest ethics of degrowth has to address it, but carefully, explicitly, and without euphemism. Population change will happen through demographic transition, not coercion: lower birth rates, longer lives, ageing societies. This brings real challenges: fewer working-age people, care burdens, pension systems built on endless growth, and deeply unequal patterns of consumption that won’t disappear on their own.
The real challenge is simple, how do we draw down “standard of living” while maintaining and improving quality of life? That means separating wellbeing from throughput. Less energy and material use does not have to mean worse lives, but only if we redesign systems around care, sufficiency, public goods, and social infrastructure rather than accumulation and profit. Housing, transport, food, health, and culture can improve even as total consumption falls, but not within the current growth-obsessed economic #deathcult logic.
When we fail to do this deliberately, it very much not going to be a smooth transition. It is collapse: scarcity managed by force, inequality hardened, and a global replay of Europe’s dark ages, this time without a stable climate or functioning ecosystems to recover into. Degrowth without ethics becomes brutality. Ethics without real structural change becomes denial.
The task is not to decide who should disappear, but to decide what must stop, what must shrink, and what must be rebuilt so that fewer resources support better lives for everyone.
We still haven’t solved this. Looking back at a conversation from six years ago, what stands out isn’t disagreement – it’s how hard it is to even name the problem we keep circling.
Over the last 20 years, again and again, the discussion slips into the same dead end: personal value versus social value, framed through the language of #dotcons platforms, followers, influence, and business growth. What we need to learn from this is the confusion isn’t accidental, it is structural.
What we need is not only #socialmedia value, not engagement, not visibility. But offline value that exists between people, over time, as shared culture, trust, memory, and capacity. The chicken-and-egg problem, people ask: “What personal value do I get from this?”, “Will this help my business?”, “Can I use this without it using me?”
We need to compost, this messy common sense path. This is why the #OMN project was never about optimising personal outcomes. That #blocking framing belongs to platform logic, the idea that every action must be measurable in reach, influence, growth, or return. This is why the posts, like the one embedded above, people found “hard to understand” weren’t speaking that language at all. It were articulating what the #mainstreaming was #blocking and thus missing from our tech culture: social value.
What is hard to communicate is that social value doesn’t work like our current common sense thinks it does. You don’t extract it first and then decide whether it was worth it. Social value only emerges after people act collectively, without clear personal payoff in advance. Yes, personal value does flow from social value. Skills, relationships, meaning, resilience, opportunity. But it’s indirect, uneven, and slow. That makes it almost invisible inside systems trained to ONLY prioritise immediate, individual reward.
That’s why the conversation keeps short-circuiting, one of the early questions was whether the posts were meant to “influence followers”. That already assumes a vertical model: speaker → audience → outcome.
But #OMN thinking starts from a different place. It’s not about influencing people. It’s about creating conditions where different kinds of interaction can happen – horizontally, over time, without a central controller. That’s why the work often looks vague, unfinished, or “omelette-like”. Cultural values can’t be shipped as a product. It has to be grown, maintained, and defended collectively.
#Facebook was a comfort trap in hindsight. In the thread, several people describe using it pragmatically: staying in touch, organising events, maintaining real-world relationships. All true, and still kinda true today. But the counter-point raised then has only become clearer since: you don’t get to opt out of being used, no matter how carefully you think you’re using the system.
The lock-in effect (“everyone is on it”) was already obvious. What was less visible to meany people than was how disastrously deeply this would shape behaviour, politics, culture, and attention – and how hard it would become to imagine alternatives once that infrastructure was taken for granted.
Why this was hard to hear at the time? This conversation shows how difficult it is to talk about non-market value inside market-dominated spaces. Language itself becomes a barrier. People reach for familiar metrics because they have no shared vocabulary for anything else. So the discussion stalls. People get frustrated. It feels circular. Someone says “find out for yourself”, another hears that as dismissal. Nobody is wrong in isolation, but the frame itself is broken.
What we can learn now? Six years on, a few things are clearer: Social value is real, but it’s slow, collective, and hard to quantify. #dotcons platforms systematically erase the conditions needed for social value to emerge. Personal value derived from social value is indirect, not extractive. You can’t explain this cleanly inside systems optimised against it. This wasn’t a failure of communication. It was an early signal that we were trying to grow an open, cultural infrastructure inside environments hostile to its very existence.
Now is time to work on the unfinished path… #OMN project was – and still is – about creating space for social value to exist again: shared media, shared process, shared governance, shared memory. That was hard to see then, it’s still hard to see now. But the confusion in this old thread isn’t embarrassing. It’s instructive. It shows exactly where the fault lines are, and why the work has always been hard, messy, slow, and necessary.
Some things only make sense after you start doing them together #KISS
The impulse, it’s not wrong. What is wrong is how often that anger gets misdirected sideways, inward, and downward instead of upward, toward actual power.
A lot of people who think of themselves as “radical” aren’t being radical at all. They’re being assholes with better language. Cancel culture in 2020 played a similar role to political correctness in the 1990s: a way to signal virtue, police behaviour, and avoid confronting real power.
An example of this – done right, a code of conduct isn’t a weapon. It’s not a piece of paper you use to beat people with. It’s a declaration that you will protect the people who actually need protection – from harassment, abuse, and structural harm.
Done wrong, rules become clubs. People pick them up and hit each other with them. The wording becomes vague, moralistic, and performative. The enforcement becomes selective. And suddenly “safety” is being used to silence any disagreement rather than defend the vulnerable.
That failure creates space for bad actors, conservatives step in and pretend they’re “speaking truth to power” or “defending free speech”, when what they’re really doing is exploiting the mess to protect the normal hierarchy and privilege. They’re not wrong that something’s broken – they’re wrong about what and why.
The behaviour being criticised isn’t a tribe. It’s a mode of thinking, a widespread, unspoken #postmodernism that still dominates contemporary discourse. A style of politics where everything is relative, language replaces material reality, and moral positioning matters more than any outcomes.
This thinking eats movements alive, it fragments people, replaces strategy with signalling, and turns accountability into spectacle. Most importantly, it redirects energy away from those actually using power. This is a dangerous moment because we no longer have a shared baseline of reality. The #mainstreaming narratives are designed to divide, distract, and trigger – pulling attention away from concrete demands and real accountability.
That didn’t come from nowhere, forty years of #neoliberal economics hollowed out material security. At the same time, generations were trained in postmodern academic frameworks that are excellent at critique but terrible at building shared ground. Strip out material analysis, strip out class, strip out power – and you’re left with vibes, identity skirmishes, and endless internal conflict.
That’s what #OMN has always been pointing toward: rebuilding social truth, shared process, and horizontal power in a culture trained to fragment itself. Without that, we keep fighting each other – and the #deathcult keeps winning.
Looking back from the mid-2020s, the arc of #web03, #NFTs, and blockchain culture is very clear. What once promised (lied about) decentralisation, liberation, and a break from corporate capture now looks like the same, mess, #techcurn pattern repeating itself, yes it had new language, new branding, but it was easy to see it had the same underlying mess making dynamics.
As these #geekproblem projects hollowed out, the signs became hard to ignore. The technical optimism faded, the user bases thinned, and the economic logic exposed itself. What followed was totally predictable: spin. Makeup and perfume slapped onto decaying projects to hide the smell of rot and exploitation. Rebrands. New narratives. New demographics. Same extraction. This was the outcome of building “liberation tech” on foundations that still centred virtical money, speculation, and power concentration.
With these projects we are now in the zombie phase, projects kept moving, kept talking, kept selling – long after the animating ideas had died. Influencers and promoters continued to perform belief, even as any substance drained away.
This is a few years when #fashionista culture met #encryptionist ideology – aesthetics and technical absolutism snogging the undead remnants of a failed #deatcult vision. The result wasn’t in any way decentralisation; it was a simply a new enclosure. People weren’t being freed, they were being financialised, the money problem #KISS
At the core was a simple structural truth: #dotcons feed on money. Put money in, influence comes out. That logic doesn’t disappear just because you wrap it in cryptography or decentralised rhetoric. “Bad actors” weren’t anomalies – they were following the incentives as designed. Aany social good becomes just collateral damage. This is why the lie collapsed in te end.
The deeper harm and problem with #techcurn is each wave claims to have fixed the problems of the last. But each wave reproduces them, because this is what works when worshiping a #deathcult. This isn’t just a failed tech trend, the #techcurn disparity, driven by extraction systems cause enormous human harm, displacing livelihoods, concentrating power, and amplifying inequality at planetary scale.
These systems don’t fail harmlessly, they fail onto people. That’s why the call isn’t just to “be critical,” but to step away – and help others step away too. Not through purity exits or individual moralising, but through collective paths back to technologies built for people rather than profit, life over zombies
There has always been another path: the #openweb. Messy, imperfect, slower, less glamorous, but grounded in shared infrastructure, social trust, and human-scale governance. The #OMN approach doesn’t promise salvation. It offers compost instead of speculation. Process instead of hype. People over tokens.
A note on hashtags: And yes, the hashtags matter. Click them., search for them. They cut sideways through algorithms – small back doors into less mediated, less controlled ways of seeing. Not a solution, but a crack in the wall.
The current #Ai hype bubble is repeating this mess with a little more useful #LLM functionality, but on top of this is a huge mess of #techchurn, which will need composting.
Observation: some people go into news to speak truth from power – using institutions to legitimise the status quo and defend the worship of the #deathcult.
Others speak truth to power – using journalism to expose, question, and challenge unequal power and its consequences.
Only one of those serves the public interest #KISS
