Tag: KISS

The Mess – If You Don’t Value Things, You Destroy Them

We live inside and meany of us under a system for 200 years, global capitalism, where value is determined not by care, connection, or any collective well-being, but by market logic. If something is not valued in that narrow logic, it is treated as waste. This means that if you don’t actively value the alternatives – you will “accidentally” destroy them. This applies to tech, culture, nature, and community.

In this, tech, has a problem of misplaced value, people still keep using #mainstreaming tools – the platforms and apps of the #dotcons – because they’re easy, because everyone else does, or simply out of habit. But this actively erodes the alternatives we’ve built: It disempowers projects like #visionontv, #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback. It centralizes control, disconnects us from human-scale governance, and reinforces #stupidindividualism.

This highlights the balance of social change vs. technological change. We must be clear: social change without tech will stall, and tech change without social grounding will fail or harm. With the #OMN projects, the #OGB is designed to bridge this divide. It’s not dogmatic, so no rigid ideology fully owns it. But it’s balanced, so many groups can come to accept it, if we can just get it implemented by a committed few.

But this implementation is hard, because we’re all facing BLOCKING, #BLOCKING and the #deathcult. We all BLOCK, we all turn away from truths that feel uncomfortable: Liberals block radical alternatives. Dogmatists block flexible, balanced ones. Most people just block anything that complicates their worldview.

And after 40 years of #neoliberalism, this #deathcult logic is deep inside us all, a vicious cycle of #stupidindividualism. Without community ownership, without collective vision, our tools fail: Projects decay into power politics and people retreat into passivity or purity spirals. And the worship of “personal freedom” just becomes fuel for the fire. We’re trapped in a feedback loop of: Individualism → Disconnection → Destruction → Fear → More individualism.

Change is messy, it’s supposed to be, that’s why we need to give/take ownership of our #openweb infrastructure. We need democratic instincts, not clean #PR. We need value-driven mess, not market-driven clarity. We need to embrace the #KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) path – precisely because it’s the hardest thing for people to do in this world of shiny distractions.

Final point is you are part of this, a lot of people are passive, lazy, even stupid – but not because they’re bad, more because the system makes them this way, because it rewards disinterest. And many of them – many of you – can’t even see the problem, because you’re so deep inside it. That’s the trap, the invisible BLOCK we must face. That’s what the #OMN and #OGB try to push through. So yes – I’m probably pointing the finger at YOU. But also inviting you to build, to grow, to compost the myths and grow something more real, more humanistic.

#KISS

Stop chasing tech cults and start growing rooted alternatives

#Musk is a useful example of the #nastyfew: wealthy technocrats wrapping themselves in the cloak of progress while undermining the foundations of any, let alone a just future. These stories and narratives about innovation are a high-tech rebrand of green capitalism, a slick façade masking the same old decaying systems of extraction, inequality, and authoritarianism.

The problem they push is that instead of confronting the #KISS causes of our social and planetary crises, these people offer us distraction: electric cars for the elitists, fantasies of Mars colonies, and #AI overlords dressed up as saviours. This isn’t transformation – it’s #deathcult worshiping continuity in crisis.

People like Musk are useful to the #deathcult because they peddle a seductive, market-friendly myth: that we don’t need to change our behaviour, our economics, or our power structures, we just need to upgrade our tech. Comforting, isn’t it? For those who benefit from the status quo, it’s the perfect nasty con.

He personally embodies the worst of the #geekproblem: the cult of the engineer, disconnected from social reality, obsessed with “fixing” the world through code and hardware while ignoring the human systems that create the problems in the first place. This is dead libertarian ideology dressed in the shrowed of innovation.

We urgently need to compost these myths. Not just resist them, actively decompose them, mix them with grounded knowledge, and grow something better from this soil.

That’s where projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network) come in – a project seeded in the messy, composted soil of decades of grassroots media and digital commons. Unlike the sleek towers of technocratic illusion, #OMN is rooted in public-first values: transparency, participation, autonomy, and trust. It’s not about building new silos or chasing the next unicorn, it’s about connecting the islands of resistance, amplifying local grassroots voices to rebuild public infrastructure for storytelling, organising, and governance.

The #OMN isn’t anti-tech – it’s pro-human. It’s a network built with people, for people – not for investors or ego-driven billionaires. It draws from the radical legacy of projects like #indymediaback, and threads in tools like #OGB to bring coherence and shared narrative to the fractured #openweb reboot. So please stop chasing tech cults and start growing rooted alternatives.

“Use and abuse” is a good strategy for dealing with the #dotcons while they continue to dominate our digital and social infrastructure. Why? Because refusing to engage with these platforms outright is the equivalent of shouting into the void – or living in a cave. And caves, while romantic to a certain type of purist, are never effective social solutions.

The truth is this #dotcons are still where the #mainstreaming people live, and mainstream attention is power, even if borrowed. As radicals or progressives, using their platforms to push counter-narratives, while simultaneously undermining their legitimacy and building our own independent infrastructure, is both necessary and strategic. Think of it as exiting from within by using their reach to grow the seeds of your alt-path.

The #OMN View – The Dogma of Anti-Dogma: Rainbow Gatherings

We need to talk about a circler familiar mess: when movements that are open, non-hierarchical, and anti-authoritarian end up recreating the problems they set out to escape. This is the “dogma of anti-dogma”, and you see it everywhere, the example I am using here is in groups like the Rainbow Gatherings.

The Rainbow Gatherings have deep roots in 1970s counterculture. Born from the peace and ecology movements, it emerged with a back-to-the-land, anti-establishment, peace-and-love spirit. Think spiritual communes, consensus meetings, and gatherings deep in the forest – far from the control of the state or system. Sound familiar? It mirrors much of “native” internet culture and resonates strongly with what we’re trying to grow through the #openweb today, in projects like the #OMN.

In the 50-year history of Gathering’s, there are no leaders, no money, no official permissions. People just show up. Communal kitchens are built, spaces are created for kids, elders, ceremonies, workshops. At the heart is the “Open Centre,” where anyone can speak, sing, or simply be. It’s grassroots in its purest form. When it balances, it becomes a lived example of radical inclusivity and cooperation. But as in any movement, issues emerge, beneath the surface freedom lie 50 years of mythos and informal traditions shaping this nomadic utopia.

This openness recurringly becomes a tangled mess for more vertical-minded people. While there’s no formal leadership, some long-timers – “elders” of any age – naturally hold more sway. And while there are no written laws, there’s a strong social tradition to follow certain paths and perform a kind of functional “openness.” When more #mainstreaming folks arrive and try to “suggest” (read: impose) better structures or force their way into consensus processes, the friction can soon become dysfunction. Often, after creating much mess, their well-meaning input ends up having to be set aside, in #OMN terms #rolledback.

Balancing this is active openness – it’s about pushing back against #mainstreaming orthodoxy being imposed without consent, without care. That tension mirrors what we’ve seen again and again in #mainstreaming “horizontal” movements, from Occupy camps to DIY tech spaces to alt-social networks. The desire to avoid hierarchy doesn’t eliminate power – but in a recurring circle it risks making it invisible. The problem isn’t structure itself, it’s unaccountable structure.

With the #OMN (Open Media Network), we face this contradiction head-on. We draw on the “native” mythos of the #4opens – Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards, Open Process – as living traditions. Not just to #KISS build tools and platforms, but to build trust networks. We’re not pretending hierarchy doesn’t exist. We aim to make it visible, accountable, and, crucially, temporary. It’s not only about flattening decision-making, but ensuring it flows through real human relationships, not hidden power or #geekproblem black-box tech.

Rainbow Gatherings walk a nomadic path, grounded in mutual care, shared meals, and rich social ritual. When we reboot the #openweb, we have to learn from that. Radical inclusivity isn’t just about keeping the doors open – it’s about building shared social mythos and working traditions. And it’s about staying alert to how exclusion creeps back in: through silence, through pressure, and often through the #mainstreaming crowd who refuse to let go.

Movements need memory, they need culture, but they also need self-awareness and space for dissent – space to reflect on the paths we’re walking together. A better #Fediverse, a real #openweb, has to be built by communities that can see their own shadows, name their own contradictions, and keep evolving together.

Because we don’t just need freedom from the state or the #dotcons. We need freedom from our own dogmas. The #OMN isn’t only about media, it’s about building the social tech, the soil where openness can grow, thrive, and renew. And it needs compost – not just as metaphor.

#OMN #4opens #RainbowGathering #OpenWeb #AltTech #ActivistTech #Dogma #AntiDogma #IndymediaBack #TrustNetworks #MakeHistory #Fediverse

Mythos and traditions are needed for revolutions to grow roots

The #nastyfew, billionaires funders fear informed, educated public

The #nastyfew are now building bunkers, literally, escaping with their bodyguards when the shit hits the fan. That’s the plan. No fixing the mess, no community care – just winning and escape. It’s #deathcult logic all the way down from now on – with pushing #geekproblem tech fixes as a cross fingers wing and a prayer, to stop any grassroots drift to green sustainable alternatives.

This is simply the next stage of the #deathcult worship of endless growth, and infinite tech “solutions”. It’s now about rebooting capitalism, so the machine can keep grinding. #NothingNew in a very bad way. This is the normal empathy for corporations, and brutal Darwinism for actual people like you and me. The #dotcons of big tech are moving visible to the business of manufacturing distraction to avoid facing the collapse they pushed for the last 20 years. The mess of #AI and #Bitcoin are energy black holes, sucking resources while pretending to be futuristic.

It should now be “common sense” that colonialism never ended – it rebranded. That’s how the consumerist growth cult started: exploit, extract, repeat. Capitalist “progress” is cancerous, more #GDP doesn’t mean better life – growth isn’t about thriving, it’s about churn. #TechCurn. The current #mainstreaming solutions are always more tech, more control, more conferences, and less reality. The #GeekProblem, with the #techbros philosophical inspiration: Nietzsche, or rather, a cherry-picked remix by his fascist sister, stitched together without context. The wannabe’s quotes “Will to Power” as gospel to justify trying to control the rest of us.

To the #nastyfew, education doesn’t mean opportunity – it means instability. A literate person is someone who questions power, organizes, votes, and leave toxic relationships. A curious mind is unpredictable. A well-informed population is a threat.

They know that: A literate woman may not rely on a man for shelter. An educated Black or Brown voter may vote in their own self-interest, unlike the more easily manipulated MAGA base. A widely read immigrant may advocate for systems beyond the #deathcult of vulture capitalism – community care, cooperative ownership, real democracy.

Education creates the conditions for social mobility, leading to change and challenge, which the #nastyfew see as an existential risk to their self defined stratified order and elitist based statues. Keeping people in their “place” is essential to maintaining control. Stagnation is strategic.

This is why capital flows into campaigns to undermine grassroots media, activists, public schools, libraries, independent publishers, school boards, and non-corporate scientific research institutions. The #nastyfew goal isn’t only profit – it’s cultural hegemony. Anything that feeds critical thinking or encourages civic imagination becomes a target.

From a progressive mainstreaming point of view, this agenda includes:

It’s a war on #4opens, public knowledge, disguised as common sense “parental rights” and “free markets.” In truth, it’s about maintaining control by keeping people uninformed and isolated, a core part of #stupidindividualism we have all been #mainstreaming for the last 40 years.

When we defend grassroots projects, activism, schools, libraries, open-source platforms, small publishers, and public institutions, we are not just defending information, we are defending democracy itself. The battle for truth is inseparable from the battle for justice. We have to build our own compost piles, plant what matters, and ignore the bling. These #nastyfew and their billionaires funders aren’t saving us – they’re digging deeper bunkers and writing climate denial checks. It well pastime to stop playing the #mainstreaming game.

#KISS

Post inspired by @Npars

We need to compost lies with #4opens horizontal networks

The #4opens makes many people uncomfortable. Why? Because it cuts through the bullshit. Think about it: #FOSS already runs most of the world’s information flows. Servers, networks, phones, clouds — all built on open code, open standards, open processes. The world already depends on openness.

Yet, when we bring this into activism, NGOs, or “progressive” tech, people recoil. They prefer managed openness – consultations, workshops, endless talk – while the real decisions stay hidden, careers protected, power intact. That’s not open, that’s control.

The #4opens is dangerous because it removes the masks:

Open Data: no hoarding.

Open Code: no black boxes.

Open Standards: no silos.

Open Process: no backrooms.

It’s common sense, but it kills the comfort of #mainstreaming, the soft power of gatekeepers shrivels under sunlight. That’s why they hate it. We already live in a world powered by #FOSS. The only question is whether we keep pretending otherwise, or compost the mess and take openness seriously.

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/4opens

Why does this matter? On the wider picture, we are now past the point where the #mainstreaming paths and crew have effectively given up on mediating #climatechaos. What we’re seeing now is ONLY the performance of action – flashy, expensive, technocratic distraction designed to keep business-as-usual afloat a little longer. It’s now not about preventing catastrophe, or even mediating catastrophe, what we have now is managed #PR and keeping in place elitist continuity as this small #nastyfew and their sycophants visibly retreat from the growing mess.

For an alt #mainstreaming view

Solutions? Take this example: https://heimildin.is/grein/24581/climeworks-capture-fails-to-cover-its-own-emissions/ Climeworks, a flagship carbon-capture initiative, is so inefficient it fails to offsetting its own emissions. This is the #techshit path the #mainstreaming are backing to get us through the next few centuries? This is beyond a mess, it’s ideological collapse. These fake solutions are the logical outcome of continuing with #neoliberal ideology, where systemic change and thus challenge is avoided at all costs, and techno-fixes are sold to us by #PR as silver bullets, the #deathcult in action, profit-driven stalling wrapped in light green branding.

Let’s be clear on this: Carbon capture is currently not scalable, not ethical, and not even functional. It is not a climate solution – what it is, is a delay tactic, a hedge for polluting industries. It’s backed by the same #nastyfew class of institutions that told us markets would fix inequality, that endless growth was compatible with ecology, that privatization would bring prosperity. The truth is simple, they, the #nastyfew we keep putting into power, have no plan. They are playing at engineering the social and ecological collapse while, at this final stage, simply pretending to be managing it.

So what do we do? We #KISS hard stop trusting in any elitist-managed futures. We collectively refuse to be spectators in the mess of the #mainstreaming paths. Instead, we compost these lies and build #4opens, rooted, local, horizontal networks of resistance and renewal. Projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network) don’t pretend to “solve” everything, but they create space for people to act together, share knowledge, mediate and hold power to account, and thus build trust for action outside the collapsing verticals.

This isn’t about hope in the abstract, it’s about practical solidarity in the spreading ruins. No one is coming to save us, but maybe we can still save each other. Let’s build the seeds of the next world, before this one burns everything down around us.

OMN, best not to get distracted, this isn’t about purity, it’s about direction
Composting the fiendlyenemy’s

In that mess lies compost…

The current state of tech and activist culture is messy, but in that mess lies compost. From arrogance, capitalism, individualism, and collapsing hierarchies, we have the material to grow something new. The #OMN is a seed for this.

Name the mess, Then root around It. Start by openly acknowledging the systemic failures that have plagued past movements. What we’re composting:

    • Arrogance & Ignorance: Build a culture of humility and learning, encourage peer mentoring and mutual aid over expertise gatekeeping.
    • Capitalism: Stay non-market by design, resist startup logic, focus on public goods, not monetization. Use #4opens to maintain transparency, participation, and trust.
    • #StupidIndividualism: Create interdependence to rebuild collective thinking with small working groups and visible shared goals.
    • Hierarchy Creep: Default to horizontal governance but defacto acknowledge and design for balance leadership, with clear boundaries that keep accountability rooted in community.
    • Emotional Disconnection: Lean into affective direct action by highlighting lived experiences and personal narratives in media and organizing.

      Compost isn’t trash – it’s transformation.

    Strengthen a clear, simple core: the #4opens. The #OMN should live and breathe the #4opens:

      Open Data – All published media and metadata is accessible.

Open Source – Tools and platforms are forkable and transparent.

Open Process – Governance and decision-making are documented and participatory.

Open Standards – Interoperability with the wider #openweb and Fediverse is core.

      This offers a solid, non-dogmatic foundation. It avoids reinventing the wheel, and builds trust – a scarce resource in today’s messy web.

      Start small, root deep. Avoid the trap of scaling before grounding by prototyping local hubs, for example with the #OMN projects, support a few active collectives already creating grassroots media. Use these as seeds: real people, telling real stories, using simple #KISS tools. Prioritize tools people already use, like Fediverse platforms.

        Create a “Trust Mesh,” not a monolith, the #OMN is not a centralized service. It’s a mesh of trusted nodes. Use reputation by proximity – if I trust a node, and they trust another, I can begin with soft trust. Encourage federated moderation – each node governs itself, but shares back its reasoning, bridging dialogue over policing. Use hashtags as protocols – this is the native language of grassroots media. Make this a cultural moment – not just a policy critique.

          In Summary, compost the rot, don’t hide it, build with: Trust not control – Cooperation not competition – Commons not commerce – Emotion not abstraction. And always – think globally, act locally. The #OMN can’t “win” the game. What it can do is change the rules by being rooted, open, and compost-powered. Let’s get planting.

          You don’t need to be a coder or activist to help grow this compost-powered future. Start by talking openly about the mess, with your friends, at work, online. Share radical but grounded ideas like the #4opens. Support or volunteer with grassroots media projects. Use ethical tech alternatives like the Fediverse instead of #dotcons. Practice mutual aid in your community – give and receive help with no strings attached. Turn down the volume on #stupidindividualism and listen to others. Most importantly, show up with humility, curiosity, and a willingness to build together. The world won’t change overnight, but let’s start planting.

          The Philosophers Talking About AI: Context, Flow, and the #geekproblem

          This is touching on the event as had to leave early.

          I was recently at a talk from the Oxford University series, “The Philosophers Talking About AI”. There were some underlying themes that are deeply relevant to how we think about privacy, information, and our current techno-social mess.

          Action vs. Paralysis, the talk opens with the tension between the strong and weak drives of human decision-making. This plays out in a constant oscillation between conversation and paralysis. Philosophically, we get stuck, debating endlessly, without acting. And in ethics, this inaction can be dangerous. If we don’t decide and act, we leave the field open for others to impose their decisions on us.

          Rethinking Privacy. One of the more nuanced ideas from the talk is a definition of privacy not as secrecy, but as appropriate information flow.

          "Privacy is not control, nor hiding – it’s about the right information flowing in the right way."

          This is a key shift. Secrecy is often anti-human – it disrupts the flow of information, which is essential to human life and community. Instead, privacy is about appropriateness, about understanding which flows are legitimate in which contexts.

          So what determines “appropriateness”? Social context. Contextual Integrity. Privacy, then, depends on social spheres, each defined by particular goals, values, and purposes. In each sphere, there are different expectations for how data should flow. These expectations aren’t always formal rules, but norms, often invisible until they’re violated.

          The speaker brings in the idea of the transmission principle – that information shouldn’t flow without the right kind of consent or context. While consent matters, it’s not the only thing that legitimizes a flow. There are many transmission predicates in society that allow information to move in meaningful, appropriate, and socially beneficial ways.

          But here’s the mess: our (post)modern systems, especially those built by geeks, often ignore or misunderstand this. This ties directly into what I often call the #geekproblem. The problem is that geeks, driven by abstract logic and rigid notions of control, block too many flows. They implement blanket rules and dogmatic blocks rather than engaging with messy human norms. Worse, they often start fighting among themselves about which blocks should exist, creating even more social dysfunction.

          They don’t see the richness of the social world. They try to “fix” it by hard-coding overly simplified versions of reality into software, creating systems that are brittle, alienating, and to often oppressive.

          This has real consequences for the #openweb and our attempts to build alternatives. If we don’t get privacy right – if we don’t understand the role of context and legitimacy in data flows – we’ll just reproduce the same broken #dotcons models we’re trying to replace.

          Beyond policy and control, most privacy policies today are useless. They reduce privacy to a box-ticking exercise, just “terms and conditions” of control. But this is a dead end. Real privacy is contextual. It involves relationships between: The subject – The sender – The recipient – The nature of the information.

          To build humane technology, we need to embed all these values into our tools and processes. That means ditching secrecy-as-default, dropping the obsession with control, and embracing appropriate social information flows.

          #KISS #Oxford #talk

          The current “debate” about AI is a distraction #KISS
          Metaphors matter, composting the current paths in #AI
          It’s a mess and building more #techshit is not helping, so back off with the #geekproblem path out of this mess, please.

          What we need is useful compost layer’s for growing native projects

          Compost, not illusions, is a first step – A radical look at “light green” tech – For a second step we need a useful compost layer for growing native projects, like the #OMN. What we currently have in most so-called “green technology” promoted through #mainstreaming and #fashernista narratives is not ecological in substance – it’s performative environmentalism, built on omission, distortion, and branding. To help make sense of this mess, let’s use the lenses of the #4opens, the #geekproblem, and the broader #openweb.

          The mess is “green” as branding, not substance. Most of today’s #mainstreaming “green” tech, like, electric vehicles (EVs), solar panels, wind turbines – is “green” in aesthetics, not in impact. These are products sold as solutions, but they’re too often rooted in the same extractive, centralized, and opaque paths and systems that caused the problems in the first place. This is the heart of the lie we need to compost, as the needed social change cannot grow from toxic soil, no matter how glossy and plastic the flower appears. If we ignore the roots, we get more illusions.

          Watch this critique: The True Cost of Green Tech (YouTube)

          The #OMN critique is to move past the false solutions and the broken paths. Yes, light green solutions pushed by institutions and NGOs aren’t inherently bad technologies – but their production, distribution, and governance models are deeply flawed. They violate every principle of the #4opens:

          • Open data: No honest accounting of full lifecycle impacts.
          • Open source: Dominated by proprietary, locked-in systems.
          • Open process: Controlled by corporations and states, with no meaningful public input.
          • Open standards: Sacrificed for monopolistic vertical integration (e.g., Tesla).

          The result is more #techshit – waste and violence hidden behind shiny #PR branding. Even our weak #NGOs point out the brutal costs: resource extraction (cobalt, lithium, rare earths), labour exploitation (child and Uyghur forced labour), and environmental dumping. These costs are buried beneath greenwashed PR aesthetics, making them palatable to consumers but invisible to our shared, and needed critique.

          The #geekproblem, the “problem” in much geek culture, is tech as saviour, this is the belief that technology itself is inherently progressive. This takes us down the paths where proposed “fixes” like nuclear follow the same flawed paths: centralized, capital-intensive, top-down systems cloaked in the language of innovation. It’s new wrapping, same old crap.

          This is not a path to climate justice. It’s a continuation of the #deathcult – digital colonialism powered by extraction, slavery, and silence. No genuine social or ecological transformation can grow from this poisoned foundation. Where the real cost of “green” tech is not just ignored, it’s deliberately silenced. This silence isn’t accidental; it’s structural. The narrative that we can “buy better things” and consume our way out of crisis is a pacifying lie. It sells comfort, not change.

          True ecological technology must be social first. It should grow from transformation, not transaction. We need to compost the lies to grow real alternatives. We must compost the #mainstreaming myths-this is the role of #hashtag stories.

          There are meany paths to take, the one I focus on is reclaiming small-scale, peer-produced infrastructure. Using the #4opens to demand transparency, accountability, and participation. Solar panels and EVs have a role, but only when embedded in a radically #degrowth paths: Open governance (#OGB), local, decentralized production (right to repair, community assembly), circular economy (reuse, repurpose, recycle), humanism as non-negotiable (no slavery, no offshoring of harm). It’s a simple, not to say old-fashioned idea of humanistic progress, maybe we can do this better this time, I hope.

          Conclusion, please #KISS the illusions goodbye, build the compost heap. Now also, please remember, we are not against technology – we’re against the lies that accompany it. As long as we keep lying about the nature of change, we cannot begin the real work. We need fertile ground – a compost layer for native projects like the #OMN – to push openness and cultivate the genuine ecological thinking we need to grow. It’s way past time for people to lift their heads from worshipping the #deathcult and stop being prats about this.

          Ignore the #AI mess, build the #OMN – This is a path

          Yes, I read the post. And yes, the despair is real. The #openweb is being bulldozed by #GenerativeAI like a forest clear-cut by machines driven not by need, but by greed, profit and power for the #nastyfew. Yes, the #deathcult of techno-capitalism is running its script to the bitter and dead-end. And yes, I too wonder if we’ll survive this, but as you say we have a path, and it’s not new. It’s simple, it’s human, and it’s working.

          It’s called the #Fediverse and the next step we need to take is “native” applications on this path like the #OMN – the Open Media Network – and it’s built from the bones and dreams of the old web: #4opens, #KISS principles, and trust-based, #DIY infrastructure. It’s a messy, human soup of tagged data and federated flows where people and content are commons by default, not walled gardens and extractive silos.

          The magic? It’s not even in the tech (though that matters). It’s in the “common sense” at the core – Anything in, anything out – mediated by trust. Lossy? Yes. Redundant? Absolutely. But that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s what makes it resilient. The #geekproblem keeps trying to engineer this out, but we need to compost that #techshit into something useful, working tools for real people, growing radical networks of care and change.

          To those staring into the digital abyss and seeing only Ozymandias and decay, look sideways, the #Fediverse lives. The #openweb still works. And we’re building new foundations from the compost of the old. We do not need to be swept along with the gray goo of #AI, we can simply not go there, and instead stay here and focus to do the work that is needed.

          “I met a traveller from an antique land,
          Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
          Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
          Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
          And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
          Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
          Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
          The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
          And on the pedestal, these words appear:
          My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
          Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
          Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
          Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
          The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
          –Percy Bysshe Shelley

          And yes, I see it too, we’ve been holding back on our own power, hesitant. Maybe our despair is part of the mess we need to shake ourselves awake from. So I ask what positive path can we walk? What part of the #OMN can we all help compost, code, shape, or share?

          Let’s rebuild the net with hands in the soil and eyes on the stars. Because the answer isn’t new. It’s what we’ve always done when things fall apart, we grow.

          #KISS

          The mess we make – capitalism and climatechaos

          FUCK, what a mess https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/28/collapse-critical-atlantic-current-amoc-no-longer-low-likelihood-study Hope you can understand you to have to start calling this current path we are all on a # #deathcult, its #KISS

          The current extreme inequality between rich and poor isn’t a bug in the system – it’s a feature of capitalism. It’s not just inevitable, it’s desirable for those who benefit from it. The structure is built to concentrate wealth and power for the #nastyfew at the top, while extracting labour and resources from the grassroots at the bottom. A contemptible disregard for those less fortunate is the design, not some unfortunate side effect our #NGO’s tell us about.

          Take a walk through any city, and you’ll see it in the gleaming skyscrapers rising above sprawling slums. In places like Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, or Cape Town, the inequality is visible at a glance. But even in the Global North, it’s masked behind fences, zoning laws, and digital walls. Capitalism excels at keeping suffering hidden or aestheticized so the few who grow fat don’t have to think about it.

          With #climatechaos as the planet continues to heat up, these divisions are only becoming more grotesque. Climate change, driven by the lifestyles and consumption habits of the Global North, will over the next 20 years be felt much more in the Global South. Rich countries, like ourselves in the UK, will continue to talk about carbon neutrality and green energy transitions, while still pushing our use of pollution-heavy industries and extracting rare earth minerals into poor nations, leaving growing environmental and human devastation in their wake.

          Examples are everywhere:

          • Electronic waste, of our shiny new gadgets which we replaced every year or two, but where do the old ones go? Places like Agbogbloshie in Ghana, one of the world’s largest e-waste dumps, for children to pick through toxic waste for scraps of metal, breathing in fumes and dying young.
          • Fast fashion, cheap clothes from brands like H&M or Zara, are made in sweatshops in Bangladesh or Cambodia, where workers earn a few dollars a day, labouring in unsafe conditions that led to tragedies like the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013.
          • Climate displacement, sea levels, floods, droughts, and extreme weather events are forcing millions to migrate. Communities in the Pacific Islands are disappearing beneath the sea, while African farmers face collapsed food systems. Yet, it should be obvious that they’re the ones who contributed least to the crisis. And when they try to migrate for survival, they’re met with growing border walls and dehumanization.

          This isn’t an accident, it’s how this nasty unthinking path works – externalize the damage, push it as far away as possible, and then build walls, digital and physical, to keep the consequences out of sight. Whether it’s the child labour behind our smartphones, the communities poisoned by oil pipelines, or the forests razed for palm oil, these are the visible costs of our convenience. That is if we look at all. In this mess of a path, capitalism is a system of organized forgetting. It turns ecosystems into commodities, people into data points, and suffering into an acceptable byproduct. The #nastyfew, and in this context this is meany of us, get to live in curated bubbles of comfort, while the damage is made invisible – outsourced, decontextualized, and sanitized.

          Best not to keep being a prat about this.

          And let’s be clear, climate change isn’t a technical problem in need of genius innovation. We already know what causes it – our addiction to fossil fuels, deforestation, industrial agriculture – and we’ve had the solutions for decades: political change and challenge to reduce emissions, transition to renewables, protect ecosystems, and radically change consumption patterns. So when people talk about “putting our brightest minds on solving climate change,” they’re both deluded and deflecting. This isn’t about a lack of intelligence or ideas; it’s about wilful political paralysis and #nastyfew vested interests. Those in power cant think outside of private escape bunkers in New Zealand. It’s not a knowledge gap – it’s a power and values gap. And that’s the much harder issue that we need to compost.

          Digging over the rot and planting something more real

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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