This post is talking in the sense of structure rather than individual experience. Let’s be honest, much of the so-called “alternative” tech scene is still stuck. Yes, we fled the #dotcons for something better, but ended up with copies of the same broken models. The #Fediverse, with all its potential, is still as often dominated by “mainstreaming meta” chat (“Twitter refugees incoming!”) or conspiracy-laden, #fashionista rabbit holes. It’s little wonder that even the nerdy privacy crowd struggles to find meaningful content or community. And no, shouting “fuck the system!” isn’t enough.
If we’re serious about systemic change, we need to do much more. The question is not if people will come, some always will, the real challenge is what they’ll find when they get here. Right now? It’s messy, insular, and missing the tools people need to use for change and challenge, let alone feel at home. We must move beyond building clones of corporate platforms and start composting the path that got us here.
This is why we need a reboot, not from scratch, but from memory. Projects like #indymediaback aim to reclaim 20+ years of working grassroots media practice. With tools like #ActivityPub we now have scalable tech that can bring those old social processes – based on #4opens (open code, open data, open governance, open standards) – into the present. The #OMN (Open Media Network) is such a path: combining the solid tech foundations with the radical social methods that we know worked (but didn’t scale).
To move at all, we must change and challenge the toxic norms of the #mainstreaming#deathcult, and yes, this means building real alternative identities and spaces that don’t live in the shadow of big tech. Being “alternative” used to mean something, and it can again, if we stop ONLY copying the mainstream and instead focus on nurturing something more strongly rooted and real.
This isn’t about being purist, #FOSS and Open Source already works in this way, the #OMN just brings this path to media and community infrastructure. It’s not utopian, it’s compost. And yes, that means dealing with hard questions, including our own funding. Let’s stop pretending we’re neutral when we’re not. Let’s build from honesty. It’s time to dig, plant, grow, and repeat.
NOTE: the comments below are a useful example of #stupidindividualism, and remember this hashtag is about social groups and their #blocking of social thinking. The history matters, flaming is not a useful response.
If we want to build meaningful alternatives, we must deal with difficult issues head-on. Sweeping things under the carpet – especially in radical spaces – always comes at a cost.
One of the more complex, and often misused, areas is around identity politics, particularly the playing of the race/gender card in ways that obscure rather than clarify the real issues at stake.
Let’s be clear: systemic racism and sexism are real. We all live with the deep, painful legacies of colonialism, patriarchy, and class oppression. These power structures are embedded in our cultures, our institutions, and, yes, in our own organizing spaces. Naming and addressing them is vital.
But sometimes, identity markers are used as shields, not in the pursuit of justice, but to avoid accountability. When this happens, especially in grassroots or activist collectives, it creates paralysis and prevents us from dealing with actual abuse of power.
A real-world example. This happened to me some years ago at a community-run space in Dalston. One person dominated meetings, spoke over others, and made every decision-making process a battleground. It was classic power politics, silencing others through constant assertion and manipulation.
When I finally took responsibility to challenge this, the room froze. Instead of engaging with the issue, some defaulted to “both sides are equally problematic.” Then, when pressure built, he played the race card, asserting that my criticism was racially motivated. No one knew how to respond. The conversation shut down. I became “the problem.” He continued unchecked.
It took 6 months of dysfunction and damage to the project before he was finally removed from collective meetings. In the end, people realised: yes, he was mentally unwell, addicted, controlling, and yes, he had useful skills. But we had all failed to support him and the group because we didn’t deal with the real power dynamics early and honestly.
Hard truths, sometimes someone uses identity-based arguments not as a reflection of structural injustice, but as a way to deflect accountability. When that happens, we can end up with unchallengeable behaviour patterns that destroy collectives from within. This doesn’t mean ignoring or downplaying racism, sexism, or mental health, far from it. It means being brave enough to hold multiple truths at once:
Someone can be from a marginalised background and be acting out of line.
Someone can be struggling with mental health and still be causing harm.
Power politics doesn’t disappear just because it’s wrapped in the language of social justice.
What Can We Learn?
Deal with issues when they come up. Don’t defer hard conversations. Don’t wait for people to burn out.
Support everyone – including people acting out – with clear boundaries, not blanket exclusion or indifference.
Distinguish real oppression from manipulative tactics. It’s not easy, but it’s essential to long-term health of communities.
Don’t collapse into false equivalences – not every confrontation is “two monsters fighting.” Trust your political instincts.
Ultimately, we need to reclaim the messy, complicated work of building trust, of calling in rather than calling out, and of recognising power wherever it appears, even when it wears familiar or “progressive” clothing. We won’t fix any of this with purism or purity politics. We’ll do it by grounding ourselves in collective care, lived experience, and honest struggle.
To use technology as a part of this social change, we need better working with the #dotcons generation. This generation is a mess. No surprise after 20+ years of submission to the #deathcult:
#Neoliberalism hollowed out our economies and replaced solidarity with consumerism. #Postmodernism fragmented identity into a battlefield of individualism over collective action. #Dotcons centralized control, turning the internet into a corporate surveillance machine.
The real question is: how do we break free? When our #fashernistas still dodge this, trapped in cycles of performative activism, #NGO co-option, and endless distraction.
The activist path out of this mess is not more chasing trendy tech stacks or branded illusions of progress. What we need is a grounded, #KISS path forward, #OMN (Open Media Network) to building grassroots, independent media beyond corporate platforms. #4opens for transparency, collaboration, and trust baked into our tech + social governance. And, reclaiming #DIY activism real-world organizing, not just digital spectacle.
We don’t need more #geekproblem “fixes” or slick branding #PR exercises. We need radical, collective agency. The tools are here, let’s build.
These people have a role in the balance of the #openweb reboot, the middle class, careerists, petty capitalist, “privileged” #NGO and co-op crew. But they need pushing themselves, when they push over this balance role… and they do become, when they don’t have any idea or understanding for the need for the balance. This is a very common problem that we need to compost.
Let’s take a step back. In an old thread about online governance, I found it revealing – and a bit frustrating – that almost nobody actually engaged with what the thread was about: building a lightweight, federated, working governance layer. The project in question is the OpenWeb Governance Body (#OGB): https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody/
We were writing a funding proposal to take a simple, well-tested social workflow (which we already know doesn’t scale in its current form), and federate it, to scale through distribution, not centralization. Think of it like this, we already have a proof-of-concept that this can work. It’s called the #Fediverse. Yes, there will be a lot of “smoke”, confusion, distraction, bureaucratic inertia. But we’ve got practice cutting through it, and could use the funding to bring in more people who see clearly and act with purpose.
What we are working on is a cultural problem, not just a technical one. This isn’t about personal attacks, it’s about recognizing a systemic cultural issue. Many people (often, but not exclusively, middle-aged white men) simply can’t see that some projects have value despite being outside their frameworks or institutional comfort zones. It’s a kind of intellectual and emotional poverty endemic to the late capitalist #deathcult era.
“Distilled, grassroots, radical governance is a good fit for the fediverse.”
And that’s what we’re doing. This work comes from decades of experience, 30+ years of distilled practice from social change spaces:
Squats and protest camps
Climate camps and Reclaim the Streets
Indymedia, XR, and even Occupy
And Rainbow Gatherings — still running on consensus-based governance born from the Vietnam-era anti-war movement (not “hippy dippy” utopias, as some imagine)
What we’re doing is embedding this lived practice into the tools and frameworks of the #openweb, creating digital tools that reflect real-world collective experience. These are bottom-up, permissionless, and rooted in doing and trust built through doing. This is not about technical fixes. It’s about using tech to open spaces for people to get messy and find their own path to cooperation.
Why we don’t use #processgeek paths like “Sociocracy”? The “problem people we touch on at the start of this article suggest alternatives like sociocracy. And sure, if that works for your group, go for it. But from the native grassroots side, sociocracy is often the equivalent of a well-meaning hippy round the campfire saying “can’t we all just get along?” while someone pisses on the garden they planted and another person ignores the washing-up rota they just taped up. It’s a structure that presumes goodwill and compliance, and that’s not enough. We’re building for mess, for people who don’t agree, for trust that emerges through doing, not rules imposed from the enlightened #blocking crew from above.
Multi-stakeholder Co-ops? Yes, but not from your typical bureaucratic blueprint. What we’re proposing looks like a multi-stakeholder co-op at times, but it’s far more grounded in anarchist and community-based models. It’s not about creating legalistic enclosures or hierarchical enforcement, we deliberately ignore that mostly irrelevant logic.
About centralization, Yes, Mastodon’s >90% of instances are in five countries. Yes, some instances hold way more users than others. And yes, that’s an issue. But we address this differently, we recognize centralization as a problem and create space for alternatives by encouraging small, local, resilient hosting.
If you run an instance in the #Fediverse, you already understand, It’s your voice, there’s a positive feedback loop here, the more care you give to your space, the more your voice matters. No need for complicated representation schemes. This is the natural governance of federation. You don’t get a vote unless you actually show up, that’s fair, if you want influence, spin up an instance, participate in the culture, do the work.
Governance isn’t something you build from scratch. It’s something you distill from lived experience.
We don’t want complexity. We want clarity, action, and real tools that reflect how people already cooperate.
#KISS wins — every time.
The project matters more for what it refuses to do, than for what it builds.
The #OGB native path is not #mainstreming, it’s a #KISS counter current, about building shared governance for the #openweb, grounded in the #4opens and real-world collective experience. Want to help? Step out of your institutional box, get your hands dirty, help make governance useful again.
Capitalism, especially in its late-stage #neoliberal form, has always had significant structural problems. In recent decades, these problems have been amplified and globalized through our society, I look here at the path of the digital platforms, what we call the #dotcons. These companies are not in any way a break from capitalism, they are its most refined, efficient, and extractive version to date.
Income Inequality
Traditional critique: Capitalism concentrates wealth in the hands of those who own capital (factories, land, assets), while workers receive only a small slice of wages.
#Dotcons example: Big Tech CEOs and early investors have become some of the richest people in human history – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg – while gig workers and content creators struggle to survive.
Amazon workers are underpaid and overworked, with high injury rates in warehouses. Meanwhile, Bezos took a vanity trip to space.
Uber/Lyft drivers bear the cost of vehicles and insurance, receive no job security, and can be "deactivated" (fired) algorithmically with no recourse.
Exploitation
Traditional critique: The wage labour system is inherently exploitative, profits come from paying workers less than the value they produce.
#Dotcons example: Digital platforms exploit user-generated content while paying creators next to nothing.
YouTube demonetizes videos arbitrarily. Creators build platforms that YouTube controls and profits from.
Facebook/Meta builds its empire off unpaid emotional labour — your social life, your attention, your photos — monetized through surveillance and advertising.
TikTok algorithms suck in youth creativity, reward a few, and discard the rest. The work is free, the profit is centralised.
We’ve all become digital piece-workers, feeding the machine with likes, posts, and swipes, and we’re not even getting wages any more.
Environmental Degradation
Traditional critique: Capitalism’s drive for infinite growth in a finite world results in ecosystem destruction.
#Dotcons example: The cloud isn’t light and airy, it’s made of data centres that consume vast amounts of energy and water.
Bitcoin mining (driven by capitalist speculation) consumes more electricity annually than Argentina.
AI training for LLMs (like ChatGPT) has a massive carbon footprint, often hidden behind “green” branding.
Amazon delivery and consumption cycles have increased packaging waste and pushed unsustainable shipping logistics into overdrive.
Digital capitalism gives us the illusion of “clean” convenience, but its ecological impact is catastrophic and accelerating.
Short-Term Thinking
Traditional critique: Shareholder capitalism focuses on quarterly profits, not long-term well-being.
#Dotcons example: The platforms build attention economies, short-term dopamine hits over sustained engagement, destroying social connectivity and democratic culture.
Twitter/X encourages outrage over insight. Algorithmic virality means trolls win.
Facebook actively promoted divisive content because it increased “engagement.”
Startups "move fast and break things" without repairing the damage. Few are held accountable.
Product design is driven by venture capital exits, not by usefulness or ethics. Tech isn’t solving problems; it’s creating new ones, faster and faster.
Lack of Access to Essential Goods and Services
Traditional critique: In capitalism, basic needs like healthcare, housing, and education are commodified, your access depends on your income.
#Dotcons example: Digital access is the new essential, but it’s increasingly paywalled and monopolized.
Google Classroom became a default education tool during COVID — but it’s ad-funded, tracks users, and lacks any transparency.
Zoom and other platforms required for remote work/schooling are corporate-run silos, with data surveillance baked in.
People in the Global South are increasingly pushed into “zero-rated” Facebook and WhatsApp ecosystems — giving up any path to digital autonomy for basic closed access.
The digital divide isn’t just about cables or bandwidth, it’s about who owns and controls the networks we rely on to build a future.
From Capitalism to #dotcons to #deathcult, the digital platforms didn’t disrupt capitalism, they turbocharged it. What we’re living through and witnessing now isn’t Big Tech behaving badly, it’s the logical endpoint of capitalism in a networked world. The #dotcons replicate and intensify the worst features of capitalism:
More control with less accountability
More labour with less compensation
More growth with more destruction
They’re efficient machines of extraction, cloaked in the language of innovation and empowerment. What’s the Alternative? We need to stop asking how to “fix” the #dotcons and start building outside of them. That means:
Supporting the #fediverse and #ActivityPub as protocols of freedom and decentralization
Backing grassroots media and alternative tech through projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network)
Embracing the #4opens
Fighting back against #mainstreaming capture by NGOs and foundations that reproduce te normal power hierarchies
Prioritizing trust over control, cooperation over extraction, and commons over private for profit platforms
We need to name the problem for what it is: Capitalism – digital or otherwise – is incompatible with the future of people and planet. It’s past time to compost it and grow something better. As a first very basic step, let’s build tech that reflects our #KISS values, not just our fears.
The current ecosystem of alternative and grassroots media is too narrow in its imagination of what media could, and should, be. There’s a persistent naivety or, in some cases, a self-serving dishonesty. Many of the most “successful” progressive media groups continue to mimic #traditionalmedia without understanding, or addressing, the fact that they do not control their distribution. In effect, they’re renting space in someone else’s empire.
This is not just a mistake. It’s the same mistake that corporate media has been making for years: relying entirely on the #dotcons, especially Google/Meta/Facebook, to reach people. The algorithms shape the message. The gatekeepers never disappeared, they were replaced by code, powered by ad dollars.
Where are we now? Most grassroots and alt-media outlets do have websites, which means they technically sit on the #openweb. But their sites rarely, if ever, link to other alt-media projects. Despite the rhetoric of solidarity, there is little visible network of mutual support, not even basic hyperlinking between allies.
They podcast, another foot in the #openweb. Yet their outreach and engagement still happen inside #silos like Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts. In practice, this reinforces the #deathcult’s control of visibility. You can’t build a new world inside the structures of the old, not if the old is designed to undermine you. Why is this mess happening? Two dominant forces are shaping this failure:
Many alt-media producers came of age inside the mainstream tech stack. They built their platforms and careers inside the same closed systems they claim to challenge. Their political commitments might be radical, but their infrastructure choices are entirely conventional. This is the liberal, capitalist version of #mainstreaming – reform, not replacement.
At the other extreme, we have alt-tech projects so obsessed with privacy and control that they create pointless parallel networks that no one uses. They fetishize encryption and “clean standards” over actual human use. The result is tech that is “safe” but irrelevant, drifting into a shrinking ghetto of #stupidindividualism. This is the libertarian version of #mainstreaming – escape, not engagement.
The has been practical work on the ground, over the last years an #openweb tech revolution built around ActivityPub and Fediverse, with projects like Mastodon, which in theory is guided by the #4opens. Yet, despite this, we still hit a wall of self-interest, naivety, and careerist short-termism from the media groups and meany individuals inside this movement.
What can we do? The web is made of links, the #openweb dies without them. If alt/grassroots media want to be part of the solution, they must start acting like a network. A simple step is to start linking to each other. Publicly. Repeatedly. On websites. On blogs. On Fediverse accounts. Use hashtags. Use lists. Tag each other. Cross-publish when relevant. This one act can change the ecosystem.
To solidify this, it’s past time for a new alt-media reboot, a small crew of linked-up, working examples that can pull others onto a sustainable, #openweb path. A real, living network of trust and mutual visibility. If we can show what’s possible, by doing it, we might begin to shift the culture. Let’s find the hopeful, grounded people to help shovel this forward.
Encryptionist geeks obsessed with crypto but forgetting human users
NGO social media managers who talk community but build silos
Process vampires who kill projects by committee
Fashionistas who follow hype cycles and abandon working tools for shiny vaporware
The #OMN is native to none of these tribes. That’s its strength. But also why it’s often ignored or misunderstood. No permissions, no gatekeeping, no central database. It just works. That’s the #KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
None of the usual suspects like this: Geeks: Don’t like using old tools like RSS or thinking socially. Politicos: Prefer being seen at the cutting edge, even if it leads nowhere. NGOs: Want measurable outcomes, not messy grassroots growth. But we need to stop building castles in the sky. Start building bridges instead.
The real block? The mental model of our tech and political culture. We’re still thinking in terms of silos, ownership, and control.
In the face of mounting crisis – social breakdown, political polarization, ecological collapse – many people turn inward. And in this turn, they mistake passivity, irony and detachment for resistance. But hopelessness is not radical, it’s deeply conservative. It says: “Nothing can change.” “Everything is corrupt.” “Why bother?”
This isn’t rebellion, it’s surrender. And it’s the exact emotional state that power systems – what we call the #deathcult of neoliberalism – need us to be in. It feeds on your hopelessness, it wants your sarcasm, it loves that you’re “above it all.”
Meme culture & irony: Subversion or sedation? What started as absurdist and ironic commentary devolves into a feedback loop of reaction over reflection. Sarcasm and irony dominate, and this can be useful satire, but more often it’s deflection. You’ll see it in:
The snide quote-tweets with no solution.
The endless “vibes” critiques in social threads.
The collapse of political dialogue into aesthetics and shitposting.
This “cool detachment” doesn’t move us any were toward change, it actively blocks it. We saw this in the decline of many #Occupy offshoots, where internal meme culture replaced organising. Or more recently in parts of climate circles, where #doomposting pushes people into nihilism instead of movement.
Inward-looking tribalism in a globalising world, the creeping tribalism of identity performance, the tendency to build ever-smaller circles of agreement and define yourself against the world instead of with it. On the surface, this might seem like radical rejection of the #mainstreaming. But it’s the opposite, a deeply conforming reaction to consumer individualism.
“Build your brand.”
“Curate your followers.”
“Find your niche.”
“Be your own revolution.”
This is #stupidindividualism, a self-defeating survival mode learned from decades of #neoliberal collapse. But there is no individual path through #climatechaos, only collective ones. We see this mess when grassroots media creators ignore collaboration and #4opens publishing, instead choosing to grow their own follower count on YouTube, TikTok or Substack. We see it when radical tech projects are siloed by pride and petty grudges, while the #dotcons eat their functionality alive.
This performative tribalism ends in isolation, not revolution. All of this is the problem, not the solution, let’s be clear:
Spaces where we speak with doubt, and listen with care.
Structures of cooperation, not only critique (#indymediaback).
We don’t need perfect answers, we need open processes, and we need to reclaim hope, not as naïve optimism, but as active engagement. So pick up your shovel, join a group of composters, feed the soil of a future worth living in.
This is an old and familiar problem: people who say they want change but consistently choose the path that neutralises it. Welcome to the “common sense” #NGO worldview, currently being repackaged in the #Fediverse as things like the Fedi Foundation. It’s not new. It’s not empowering. It’s a tired institutional gravity that drags every radical project into a fog of bureaucracy, branding, and paid careers.
In contrast, we have the “nativist” #openweb crew – grassroots people working with messy horizontalism and free tools, trying to keep the fire alive. See the more grounded reflections like What would a fediverse “governance” body look like?.
And then, sitting awkwardly in between, we have the #geekproblem, coders who are working hard on technical processes like the FEPs (Fediverse Enhancement Proposals) but who avoid touching anything political. They’ve been pushing the #fep process for years now, and while technically interesting, they often ignore the deep political questions of governance and power. That’s fine. But it leaves a vacuum.
The risk: If native paths don’t move, the NGO model will win by default is the hard truth, if the “native” #openweb people don’t move beyond our tired leftist divisions and infinite internal critique, then the #NGO model will be imposed. History tells us this, over and over again. Nature abhors a vacuum. Institutions are always waiting to fill the space with “best practices,” dull forms, and “inclusive” hierarchy. It’s just what happens when there’s a failure to organise from below.
And here’s the problem, the argument between “structure” and “lack of structure” is largely a strawman. Most functioning grassroots projects have lots of structure, it’s just soft structure: relational, implicit, culturally encoded, emergent. The #OGB project (Open Governance Body), for instance, grew from the #EU outreach work and shows this kind of structure in action. It’s not rigid like an NGO. It’s not anarcho-chaos either. It’s #KISS structure, small, practical, and adaptable. But people often miss this because they’ve been taught to only see hard structure: constitutions, charters, legal entities, chairs, and trustees. This blindness is a serious block.
On coops, NGOs, and the shadows of the #Deathcult. A note on coops: They’re often cited as a model alternative. And yes, coops can be good. But many have been co-opted. They function more like bureaucratic relics than vibrant counter-systems.
Examples:
The Coop supermarket hired Tesco managers to “turn it around,” resulting in soviet-style shopping and a full embrace of corporate logics.
The Coop Bank? Try dealing with them — they’re functionally broken through bureaucracy.
1970s wholefood coops had potential — many evolved into neoliberal health shops in the 1990s, selling overpriced turmeric capsules to middle-class wellness seekers.
In contrast, activist organising – even when messy, clumsy, and exhausting – is a better bet. It rarely becomes the shadow of the #deathcult because it is in active struggle against that system. NGOs and formalised coops often become the shadow by default.
What should we do?
Name the problem without being prats about it. People drift into #mainstreaming by habit, not usually by conspiracy. But habits can kill movements. Name them. Push back gently but firmly.
Embrace diversity of organising models. Don’t push coops or NGOs as a one-size-fits-all. Sometimes a loose affinity group or soft network is better. Sometimes a coop makes sense. But don’t dogmatise structures that we know often fail.
Build soft structure, not rigid rules. Ask simple questions like “How does this work with the #4opens?” or “Does this strengthen the PGA Hallmarks?” This builds accountability without shutting down creativity.
Support native projects like #indymediaback, #OGB, and the #OMN, these are based on working structures, rooted in radical history, and built by people with lived experience of doing the work.
Don’t confuse visibility with substance. Just because a foundation or NGO gets press or looks shiny, doesn’t mean they’re doing anything real. Look under the hood.
Compost what needs composting. Don’t let failed or flawed projects keep clogging up energy space. Say goodbye, thank them for their lessons, and move on. We have enough shit to shovel already.
In summary, we don’t need to choose between chaos and bureaucracy. There’s a third path of soft, relational, rooted organising with shared values, proven history, and practical tools. But we have to fight for it. Because if we don’t, the NGO train will keep rolling through, colonising everything with HR-speak and grant metrics. And we’ll be stuck rebuilding, again and again. Let’s not waste more time on that.
If you’ve ever tried to build something radical, collective, and actually useful, you’ve run into strong #blocking forces. They’re not just annoying, they’re dangerous, structural, and they always show up. This post is about naming those, calling them what they are, and understanding how they’re entangled in the wider problem:
A culture that valorizes individualism, feeds on careerism, and bows to the false “common sense” of the neoliberal #deathcult.
The #NGO agenda: Careerism in activist clothing, highlights how too many grassroots projects are co-opted by well-meaning (or not-so-well-meaning) NGOs and their functionaries, who come waving grant forms and talking about partnerships. But really, they’re selling a diluted, bureaucratic version of change that fits inside capitalist institutions, with jobs and funding flows to protect.
At best, they water down radicalism into “deliverables.” At worst, they actively trample grassroots horizontality to build careers. They normalize the #dotcons. They manage, rather than transform. This isn’t conspiracy, it’s structure. And we need to build outside this deadened swamp.
What keeps this hard to see is the petty politics and personal grudges, as micro-level sabotage, let’s be honest, some people would burn the future to win a petty feud. This is the everyday rot of #stupidindividualism, where narrow self-preservation and shallow ego become more important than collective progress.
Projects like #indymediaback, which depend on shared vision and mutual respect, break down when people refuse to grow beyond grudges. These behaviours reflect deeper cultural damage, we’ve been trained to see each other as threats, not collaborators. #KISS we can’t build anything real if we don’t actively mediate this. That means talking it through, holding space, calling it in, before it derails the work.
The liberal trap is about dogma masquerading as “common sense”. I’ll say something unfashionable, I have respect for old-school liberalism. It gave us social safety nets, education, some rights, a lot of good stuff came out of liberal traditions. But today’s dogmatic liberals, clinging to broken institutions and smearing “common sense” over radical action, are a drain on movement energy. Their default is always compromise, always moderation, even when the world is on fire. We’re stuck negotiating with people who believe the future is a reformed version of the past. It isn’t. We need to move forward, not beg to stay where we are.
The #geekproblem is about control, complexity, and disconnection. We’ve talked about this before, and it keeps coming up. The #geekproblem is when technologists build tools for control rather than empowerment, for complexity rather than access, for themselves rather than people. Often dressed in “neutral” language or “perfect systems,” these tools lock out users, deny social context, and kill collaboration with arrogant assumptions. The fix? Build for people, not machines. Use the #4opens. Work from #DIY practice, not just theory. Centre community. Make it work for the bottom, not only the top.
The path we need is compost isn’t about perfection. We need to admit we’ve all played roles in the mess. The key is naming it, owning it, and moving differently. Tools like #OMN, #indymediaback, and #OGB are not ONLY shiny new things. They’re grounded in lived practice, built to solve real problems. They don’t pretend to be magic fixes, they are basic shovels, to compost the current mess, to old space to grow something better.
Let’s get on with composting the #tecsit. We don’t need another app, another platform, another paper. We need to build trust-based networks, support each other, and get our hands dirty together. If we work for it, a humanistic future is still possible, to make this happen we need to stop feeding the #deathcult and start feeding the soil.
Add your thoughts in the comments: What Blocks the progressive path? We need to name these issues clearly, not to shame individuals, but to make them visible as systemic patterns we all get caught in. So tell me: what else is holding us back? What sabotages collective projects from within? Let’s document the patterns so we can start composting them.
We’re living in an age of permanent crisis, there’s no going back to “normal.” Stop waiting for it. Let’s just STOP worshipping the #deathcult as a first step away from this mess. The trap we’re in, neoliberalism, or the #deathcult, isn’t optional. It’s systemic. You don’t get to opt out unless you’re rich enough to buy an island… and even then, it’s a fantasy.
But metaphors have value. #deathcult is a metaphor, yes, and a sharp, useful one. It’s a name for the dominant ideology of the last 40 years: neoliberalism, where markets are sacred, society is optional, and #climatecollapse is just another economic opportunity.
We use hashtags like #deathcult, #fashernista, #climatechaos, #stupidindividualism not to confuse, but to bring dry, academic critique into emotional, accessible terms. They’re #KISS, Keep It Simple, Stupid. They cut through the noise, if you let them.
Want an example? I lived a metaphor, ten years ago, I bought a lifeboat and sailed away. Not into isolation, but into reflection. For the last five years, I’ve lived outside most laws and norms. Not because I think that’s the answer, but because it’s one place to plant seeds for better ones.
But the boat, like the #nastyfews islands, isn’t freedom. It’s a metaphor. A stopgap. A reminder that we can step sideways, temporarily, to prepare for change, but only IF we come back and build together.
Power is always social. There is no “DIY freedom” that doesn’t end in loneliness or failure. You are powerless until you engage with others, to build trust and accountability. This is what the #OMN is about. It’s not individual exit, it’s collective entry.
So, talk in metaphors. Use the hashtags. Share the language. Together, they tell a story. But only if you join in.
No more waiting for heroes.
No more worshipping broken systems.
No more technocratic denial.
It’s time to compost the old world and plant something new.
There’s a common confusion, pushed by well-meaning #fashernistas, about how change actually happens. They love theory. They love to talk about change. But when it comes to doing, things go sideways. Why? Because good horizontalists know: theory must emerge from practice, not the other way around.
At the root of radical practice is #DIY culture. We don’t wait for perfect theory or academic approval. We get our hands dirty. We try things, we fail, we try again. Through this, we build theory that is grounded in reality, not floating above it.
The Problem with top-down theory is that when you start from theory alone, disconnected from lived experience, you go ground and round in abstract circles. Then, inevitably, someone tries to apply this neatly wrapped theoretical package as a “solution” to the mess we’re in… and it breaks everything.
At best, this leads to another layer of #techshit to compost. At worst, it becomes academic wank, beautifully phrased but practically useless, imposed on grassroots organisers trying to get real work done. We’re tired of clearing up after these failed interventions. Focus matters. Resources are scarce. Energy is precious. The practice-first approach, is why we’re doing something different with projects like:
#OMN (Open Media Network): building tools from the bottom up, with open metadata flows and radical trust.
#Indymediaback: rebooting a proven model of grassroots publishing that worked, updated for today.
#OGB (Open Governance Body): prototyping governance based on lived collaboration, not abstract debate.
All of this is theory grown from practice. None of it came from think tanks or grant-funded consultants. It came from kitchens, camps, squats, TAZs, mailing lists, and dirty hands. If you want to be part of this work, great. But please engage with it as it is. Bring your experience, your skills, your curiosity. But don’t dump disconnected theory on it. Don’t smother the flow with top-down frameworks or overthought abstractions.
We need people to join the flow of practice. Let the theory emerge where it’s needed, like compost, growing what feeds us. So: Start where your feet are. Build from what works. Trust the process of doing. And please, don’t push mess our way. We’ve got enough of that already.
Capitalism’s invisible hand has always relied on hidden data. In the digital age, that data is metadata the overlooked, under-the-hood information that tells us who, where, when, how often, and what next. It doesn’t matter what you say or do if someone else controls the context around it. That’s where the power lies. Let’s be clear: the battle for metadata is the battle for the future.
Three Broken Paths
Capitalism: Metadata is hoarded by the #dotcons. Google, Meta, TikTok—they thrive on extracting context from your every click. It’s not about what you say, but what your patterns say about you. They sell this to advertisers, to governments, to anyone with enough cash. Capital controls metadata, metadata controls behaviour, and behaviour keeps the system in place. This is the tech-feudalism of today—soft fascism in algorithmic form.
Chinese Communism: Here, the state doesn’t outsource metadata - it gathers it centralisis it. Then Social credit systems finds people as patterns and use this to reshape disfuctional paths. The state controls metadata, metadata controls capitalism. It’s the digitised return of the "command" economy.
Liberalism: Wants to privatise metadata to the individual, to revive the mythical free market of rational actors with perfect information. But this is a fantasy—metadata’s power comes from aggregation, and no individual can match corporate or state capacity to hoard it. The liberal path leads to a more blinded, slightly less abusive cage.
Anarchism and the Commons: A Fourth Way
What does anarchism want? It wants the social conditions for free association. It wants autonomy, not just individual, but community autonomy. The #4opens and the #OMN (Open Media Network) are an explicit political project to create this.
Open data: everyone can see and use.
Open metadata: the tail behind the content, telling you where it came from and how it’s been passed around.
Open process: how decisions are made is visible and changeable.
Open code: tools are modifiable and forkable.
The #OMN doesn’t pretend metadata isn’t powerful, it’s built around that power. But instead of hiding it, it makes that power visible, shared, and accountable. We’re not encrypting metadata into irrelevance. We’re composting it into trust.
Commons vs. the market, capitalism uses metadata to target, extract, and sell. We use metadata to share, trust, and build. The #OMN is a radical shift to replace the market with metadata commons. In capitalism, knowledge is hoarded for advantage. In the commons, it is shared for coordination. The market’s “invisible hand” becomes the commons’ visible knowledge, messy, partial, human, but rooted in mutual aid, not profit.
Hard vs. soft power, the #OMN doesn’t rely on cryptographic “hard” security. It builds “soft” trust:
You don’t need perfect encryption, you need networks of relationships that resist capture.
You don’t need top-down control, you need reputation, memory, and care.
It’s not about preventing all bad things, it’s about making good things easier to grow, and bad things harder to spread.
Yes, if the state turns fascist, they’ll try to use metadata against us. But they already do. The #OMN doesn’t pretend in any way to offer perfect protection. What it does offer is a head start in building the infrastructure for resistance, before the rubber truncheons arrive.
This matters, metadata will happen, no matter what you do, you can’t opt out, you can only choose where the power flows:
Capitalists?
States?
Individuals?
Or communities?
We choose the commons.
And we make this chose, not in theory, but in practice. We’re building systems that work today, in browsers, on the streets, and in activist circles. This isn’t just tech, it’s a strategy, a shovel for the compost, a way to make new life from the old system’s rot.
What Should We Do With Metadata? A Post-Capitalist Path via #OMN
We’re in a global metadata arms race, and most people don’t even know the stakes.
Capitalism wants metadata privatized – hoarded by #dotcons to manipulate markets and politics. This power now controls the state. Welcome back, fascism.
Authoritarianism (like China’s digital state) wants metadata centralized, state-controlled to command capitalism itself. The command economy returns, just digitized.
Liberalism wants metadata individualized, a libertarian dream of sovereign users and self-determined markets, it still leans into myths of meritocracy and fails to balance collective power.
But what if we chose a fourth path? Anarchism, grounded in voluntary association, mutual aid, and decentralization, this is the path #OMN walks. Using #4opens, we’re attempting a #KISS trust-based, commons-driven model for metadata.
The Commons of Metadata. In the #OMN (Open Media Network), metadata isn’t hidden or monetized. It’s open, trusted, and functional, a new kind of commons. This visibility becomes the replacement for capitalism’s “invisible hand.”
We don’t sell metadata, we use it to replace the market, we organize with it, not exploit it. Metadata flows become signals of trust and connection. Shaping what gets seen, valued, and shared. It’s post-capitalist infrastructure based on visibility, not secrecy.
How it works: A trust-based metadata flow, a simplified trust model for content flows:
Link – I find your flow useful.
Trust – We’ve got a relationship.
Moderate – Let’s build that relationship.
Rollback – Something went wrong, undo it.
Unlink – This isn’t working.
We don’t just trust blindly, metadata lets us query the trust network, ow many people I trust also trust this? Is this source consistently reliable? What do community tag say about this? This keeps quality high, even when bad actors appear. If necessary: unlink, rollback, move on.
What About Surveillance and Security? We’re honest: the #OMN network can’t protect you from a fascist state. No tech can, but we can use pseudonymity with known-good peers. Whisper in the forest before posting. Protect sources while keeping distribution open.
Use P2P crypto for the 20% of cases that need it – not the 80% that don’t. Unlike the #encryptionists or #geekproblem crowd, we’re not building bunkers. We’re planting gardens.
Why It Matters – If metadata is the new currency, then open metadata is the new commons. Capitalism runs on closed systems – the #OMN runs on shared knowledge and decentralized trust.
This isn’t about perfect tech. It’s about human-scale trust, community autonomy, fast, messy, democratic distribution and real-world resilience. It’s not utopia. It’s compost and we’ve got the shovels.
The current media environment is heavily skewed towards establishment interests, making it difficult for progressive movements to gain any traction.
Everyone knows we are in a mess, but most people are too distracted to do anything to change this. Most of us keep on this path – scrolling, clicking, consuming – because the current mess we live in is incredibly skilled at hiding consequences.
The environmental cost is buried under greenwashing. BP rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum.” Shell sponsors art galleries. Apple makes claims about “carbon-neutral” devices, then glues batteries shut to prevent repair. Meanwhile, rare earth extraction, e-waste, and fast fashion destroy ecosystems from Congo to Cambodia.
The labour cost is outsourced, invisibilized, atomized. Amazon warehouse workers urinate in bottles to keep pace with surveillance timers. Foxconn installs suicide nets around dorms. Uber calls drivers “partners” while avoiding all responsibility for their lives or livelihoods.
The mental health cost is reframed as personal failure. You’re anxious and burnt out? Must be your mindset. Try a mindfulness app. Maybe eat better. Maybe “grind smarter.” Meanwhile, the structure of your life, precarious work, information overload, climate dread, is never questioned.
The social collapse is blamed on the “irresponsible poor” or “divisive politics.” Communities are gutted by austerity, housing is hoarded by speculators, but you’re told it’s your neighbour’s fault, immigrants, the unemployed, the other political tribe. The system throws fuel on every fire, then lectures you on “civility.”
Every crisis becomes your problem, not the system’s. This is because the #deathcult we unconsciously worship doesn’t just produce stuff, it produces numbness, distraction, and above all, thoughtlessness. A never-ending now, stripped of memory and consequence.
And the moment you try to pull back the curtain? There’s a brand, an #NGO ready to sell you “resistance” too. It’s a system designed to make rebellion feel like a clone lifestyle choice.
A t-shirt with a slogan.
A rainbow flag slapped on a weapons manufacturer.
A “climate justice” conference sponsored by Shell.
A new Netflix docuseries about the thing you’ll forget by next week.
#KISS resistance requires more than outrage, we don’t just need better tech or better politics. We need:
Better attention — to what's real and what's propaganda
Slower thinking — against the churn of hot takes and algorithms
Reclaimed time — stolen back from platform metrics and work schedules
Spaces for consequence — where the impacts of our actions (or inactions) are visible, shareable, accountable
That’s why #DIY infrastructure, the commons, and openness, matter. That’s why we reboot the #openweb, with the #4opens, with the #OMN, with peer-to-peer tools, and with each other. And we need to do this before thoughtlessness becomes all we have left in the #mainstreaming mess.
