The #NastyFew are not hiding in the shadows, they’re integrated. The so-called “Epstein files” are not the record of one predator. They are a snapshot of how #mainstreaming works at elitist levels, a map of proximity around the people who default-run the mess we call society.
Billionaires. Prime ministers. Cabinet officials. Tech founders. Bankers. Cultural icons.
From Bill Gates to Elon Musk. From Reid Hoffman to Peter Thiel. From Ehud Barak to Prince Andrew.
Different countries. Different parties. Different supposed ideologies.
Same choreography:
Minimise. Deny. Distance. Then quietly continue.
This isn’t a normal view of Left vs Right. It’s naked class power of capital, office, platform and narrative dominance. We are ruled by a tightly interlocked ecosystem of board members, ministers, venture capitalists, financiers, media gatekeepers, and intelligence-adjacent operators who circulate through the same rooms.
When someone like Jeffrey Epstein enters that ecosystem, the question isn’t “Is he moral?” It’s “Is he useful?” for access, introductions, money flows and information leverage. Utility beats any ethics, every time. The system Is working, If it were broken, this mess would have triggered collapse. Instead, what did we get? Public outrage cycles, partisan weaponisation, conspiracy noise, then normality. All the mainstreaming did was shrug, markets, platforms, elections and most importantly funding rounds continued. We get increasing calls that the mainstream needs to move on.
What we are experiencing is not failure, it’s design. The system functions as intended: absorb scandal, protect capital concentration, maintain continuity. Consolidation Is the real danger, it isn’t only the criminality, it’s this consolidation. Look at the overlap:
The founders of the #dotcons we use to communicate.
The investors shaping AI and data infrastructure.
The companies building surveillance tooling.
The politicians writing regulatory frameworks.
The financiers underwriting the entire stack.
When the same class controls:
Capital
Media distribution
Data infrastructure
Political influence
As more evidence surfaces, something predictable happens. Truth becomes radioactive, reasonable people back away, the conversation collapses into culture-war sludge, signal drowns in noise. Information overload stabilises the system, not an accident that while we argue, the #NastyFew consolidate.
You cannot reform a system that protects itself through structural interdependence. Accountability becomes theatre, you can only build outside its smoke, mirrors, and radioactive truth. The hard part is waiting becomes consent, and we keep waiting for the courts, elections, investigations, journalists and for platforms to regulate themselves. But those institutions are staffed, funded, and structurally influenced by the same #nastyfew class. Waiting is not neutral, it is consent via inertia.
To start to compost this mess we need to get back to rebooting an alternative, for twenty years I’ve been arguing that we urgently need to reboot a working alternative. A good place to start is the #openweb as the mainstream web is dominated by corporate platforms tightly coupled to capital and intelligence ecosystems. We cannot keep debating inside systems owned by the #NastyFew and expect any structural change.
We need #4opens publishing infrastructure, federated networks with transparent governance and community hosting to build protocol-level resilience infrastructure. Not hobby projects, this is where projects like the #OMN come in – Replace, Don’t Rage – If the top layer is structurally compromised, the answer isn’t endless outrage, it’s replacement. But not with another billionaire, another charismatic founder or “ethical” walled garden. But with #KISS open protocols building shared distributed control for memory that cannot be quietly buried.
Because the real lesson here isn’t just that elitist protects elitists, it’s that centralised systems protect concentration of power, and concentration of power always protects itself. We need to build the alternative before the #NastyFew finish locking the doors.
Let’s be clear, the current #mainstreaming was never a social justice path. This isn’t conspiracy theory, it’s documented history, the archive is public. But when we forget history, propaganda works better. When people and communities challenge dominant economic arrangements – resource control, industrial policy, alignment with rival powers – they enter dangerous territory. And this matters, because fear feeds myth, and myth feeds compliance.
This matters for the #OMN as the battle is not military or economic, it is informational, when #mainstreaming agencies master social media aesthetics and narrative framing, the line between media and propaganda blurs further. There is no neutral “information environment.” in the #dotcons, there is infrastructure, and whoever controls it shapes perception, It’s why #4opens media matters, why memory matters. That’s why the #OMN is not only about publishing tools, but about resisting amnesia.
We live in a mess, on a planet with 8 billion people, we produce enough food for far more, yet billions are hungry – not because of scarcity, but because of distribution mediated by money. If markets fail to meet basic human needs at planetary scale, insisting that they will eventually fix themselves becomes its own form of idealism. Calling that out is not naïve utopianism, it’s structural realism.
Compost the bad myths, we don’t study history to marinate in resentment, we study it to understand power. #dotcons glamour does not erase violence, inclusion does not erase intervention and rebranding does not erase mandate. If we want an open future, we have to defend it.
Memory against amnesia, infrastructure against capture and media against propaganda. There is no such thing as “independent media” floating above power, there is media aligned with structures of power and there is media that challenges them. #OMN is a path to build the latter.
Meany people see the world degrading, enclosure accelerating. They see climate, politics, media all bending toward extraction. And even when they can see the trajectory, they feel powerless, so they cope by optimise their careers. They scroll. They argue. They consume. They retreat into irony. From birth, we’re trained into one core assumption: There Is No Alternative (#TINA).
Not because it’s true, but because every dominant institution reinforces it:
Schools train compliance.
Media normalises enclosure.
Platforms reward performance over substance.
Workplaces absorb our creative energy into extractive systems.
The message is subtle but constant:
“You can’t change anything.”
“Radicals just break things.”
“Be reasonable. Fit in.”
For builders, this message hits differently, because we know alternatives are possible, we’ve already built them. This is the #FOSS Paradox, as free and open source software proves collaboration without enclosure works, commons-based production works, open standards work and distributed governance can work. Yet somehow, the infrastructure we helped build keeps being enclosed.
The #openweb became the #dotcons, protocols became platforms and communities became markets. Not because we failed technically, but because we underestimated scale, incentives, and capture. And too often, we built tools without building parallel social power. The real trap isn’t rebellion – It’s drift – The #mainstreaming system doesn’t survive by crushing everyone loudly. It survives by absorbing alternatives, funding safe versions of dissent, steering energy into manageable channels and exhausting people with maintenance and precarity
Gatekeeping doesn’t always look like repression, more it looks like grants, partnerships, “best practices,” and institutional legitimacy. The result is that talented builders end up reinforcing the systems they once set out to replace. Not out of malice more from survival.
This Is where #OMN and #4opens come In, it isn’t only ranting about what’s broken, it’s about rebuilding missing layers:
Trust
Shared infrastructure
Media flows outside algorithmic capture
Governance rooted in actual participants
The #4opens are not branding, they are structural safeguards:
Open data
Open source
Open standards
Open process
Without all four, enclosure can creep back in, slowly, politely and inevitably.
This Is not about individual heroics, the myth of the lone hacker is part of the problem. What we need for the new “common sense” is that #stupidindividualism is a dead end. Few people escape extractive systems alone, no one builds durable alternatives alone. Collective infrastructure helps build counterweight to centralised power.
That’s what the #Fediverse gestures toward, what the #openweb once promised, and what needs strengthening now. A first step is to stop pretending we’re powerless. If you’re in #FOSS, you already have:
skills
networks
literacy in decentralised systems
experience with commons governance
What’s missing isn’t capability, it’s coordination and shared direction. The first step isn’t dramatic, it’s simple, reject the #NGO path to:
Find your people.
Support projects aligned with the #4opens.
Build flows, not just features.
Connect tools to real communities.
Refuse quite capture.
Do something – anything – that strengthens commons infrastructure instead of platform enclosure. The biggest lie Is that there’s no choice, when we keep repeating “this is just how things are,” eventually it becomes self-fulfilling. But history says otherwise, every dominant system looks permanent, until it isn’t.
The real outsiders aren’t the loudest rebels, they’re the ones who quietly stop reinforcing broken systems and start building viable alternatives. That’s what this moment asks of the #FOSS community is not #blocking outrage, not purity and not only collapse fantasies.
So, please stop waiting for permission, build systems that align with human autonomy and biophysical reality by strengthening commons before they’re erased. Because alternatives don’t appear, they’re built, and if we don’t build them, enclosure wins by default.
Scale changes everything as human behaviour does not stay the same as groups scale. The instincts that helped small tribes survive – loyalty, signalling belonging, defending boundaries, competing for status, consolidating influence – functioned well within natural limits. In small groups, feedback was immediate. Consequences were visible. Power was constrained by proximity and material reality.
But when those same instincts operate at contempery social scale, inside complex technological societies, like the current #NGO fediverse, they stop stabilising systems and begin to destabilise them. What once supported survival can amplify fragmentation. What once built cohesion can produce polarisation. What once protected the group can spiral into extraction and enclosure we start to see now. This is not a moral failure of the human species, it is a predictable outcome of scale.
We now live inside systems where ancient social instincts interact with global networks, algorithmic amplification, financial abstraction, and industrial metabolism. The more-than-human crisis – climatechaos , biodiversity collapse, geopolitical fracture – is not collection of surface problems, these are symptoms.
Beneath them are recurring systemic patterns, society-scale incentives. And beneath those incentives are deep assumptions about growth, control, competition, and scarcity. We are not outside these layers, we are embedded within them. So the question becomes what does responsibility look like in a world where powerful structural incentives shape collective outcomes? Where do social thresholds appear when scale removes the natural limits that once kept us in balance? How do we avoid only treating symptoms while reinforcing the deeper forces producing them?
And if our instincts once helped seed the current fediverse, we did see for a moment what a system look like that works with human nature while balancing it against #dotcons reality. This is the path we need to get back to, to understand how the current tensions I outline, in the fediverse makes sense. Because what we are seeing there is not just a #blocking governance disagreement. It is a microcosm of the larger scale problem: how human coordination patterns behave when they move from small, trust-based communities into bigger networked infrastructures.
The fediverse is not separate from this, it is one of the places where we are actively trying to work it out. To start down this path we need to look at how the last #openweb reboot was taken from us.
The #dotcons aren’t just “big tech companies.” They’re a structural class of platforms they follow the same pattern:
Present themselves as open, liberating, participatory spaces.
Attract huge numbers of people with network effects and free access.
Gradually enclose that activity.
Monetise attention by shaping reach, visibility, and behaviour.
The “con” isn’t that they charge money, the con is the bait-and-switch:
First: open participation, organic reach, community.
The “dot” is the monetisation layer – advertising markets, behavioural profiling, engagement engineering. Even the so-called ethical platforms operate on the same structural logic:
You can swap out leadership, branding, or tone, but if the core model is:
capture network → centralise control → monetise attention
… then it sits in the same class.
Naming them 20 years ago as #dotcons isn’t about moral outrage, it’s about clarity, because if we don’t name the enclosure pattern, we end up debating personalities and features instead of structure.
Where this matters for the fediverse is simple – If we don’t consciously build flows, commons, and #4opens practices into the infrastructure and culture, the same enclosure dynamics will re-emerge – just more politely.
The difference isn’t tone, it’s structure. And being clear about what the #dotcons are helps us see what we are trying not to reproduce.
The idea and direction are broadly right (decentralised social web, commons infrastructure, alternatives to #dotcons). but the institutional reality is hollow, not enough resources going into the “native” messy grassroots work that actually keeps things alive.
People like Evan and others stepping into fediverse organisational roles are, from their perspective, trying to stabilise infrastructure, secure insitunal funding streams, reduce fragmentation and make the ecosystem legible to funders, regulators, and mainstream paths. From this side, the fear tends to be that without some coordination and institutional structure, the fediverse stays marginal or collapses under maintenance debt.
Were from the native the grassroots/activist side institutionalisation risks repeating Web 2.0 capture light – NGO-isation, depoliticisation, and slow drift toward mainstreaming and soft #blocking control.
You could see this as basically stability vs autonomy, funding vs independence, coordination vs organic growth. But better to see it for what it is a resource problem (the real bottleneck) “ZERO resources for what we actually need” is key, and honestly widely felt. Where funding currently goes to protocol development, interoperability standards, software maintenance grants and pointless governance experiments that look credible to funders.
Where resources don’t go on balence to “native” non #NGO community organising, onboarding and social infrastructure that is not mainstreaming. Seeding and growing local/regional native networks. Alternative governance experiments outside formal org structures and most importantly public-first infrastructure (like the #OMN direction) In short technical sustainability gets funded; social sustainability struggles to grow.
#NLnet and geekproblem, #NGO dynamics tend to operate with a narrow philosophy of fund discrete, bounded technical projects that avoid any political positioning to prioritise measurable outputs (code, specs, deployments). This creates structural friction because as infrastructure projects for grassroots media and social organising doesn’t fit neat grant deliverables. Long-term community building is messy and hard to quantify. Native radical or openly political framing scares institutional funders.
So we reinforce a path where money exists, but it flows toward the wrong layers for movement-building. So when dose this balance change? This is the hard truth: systems like this rarely change because people ask, they change when people push parallel practices that make the gap obvious.
What history teaches us in the #openweb is Indymedia didn’t wait for permission, early blogs didn’t wait for foundation approval and Mastodon itself grew outside institutional planning. Change tends to happen through parallel infrastructure, witch is how the fedivers reboot happened in the first place before our current shift to #NGO structures and people takeing over our shared direction.
So how do we get out of this mess? By finding seed funding and affinity groups to build/use alternatives that demonstrate missing pieces like public-first media networks (#OMN), social layer experiments and governance models rooted in users/admins, not foundations (#OGB). We need this narrative pressure, not just critique, re-framing “Fediverse” as one implementation of broader #openweb rather than the destination and shifting language from platform to ecology.
Resource routing from the current institutions if they are at all capable of this, or giving them a good, if polite, kicking if they are not. Not to knock them out, more to knock them aside, they are still native on balance. The uncomfortable reality we need to compost is the current institutional layer probably thinks they are solving the resource problem – just at a different level (protocol legitimacy, policy access, etc). So the conflict isn’t only “they are wrong” but they are solving a different problem than the one native actors see as urgent.
Where leverage might actually exist if our goal is shifting direction rather than just venting (which is understandable 🙂), leverage tends to come from building cross-admin alliances (server operators are a missing power bloc, framing needs in operational terms (“X infrastructure gap causes Y burnout/failure” and linking fediverse survival explicitly to native grassroots media use-cases.
To work on this it helps to see the factions currently shaping Fediverse governance., a long sometimes over lapping list
The Greybeards of every genda (early web + protocol veterans) worldview The fediverse is the continuation of the original web ethos. Protocols matter more than platforms. Stability and interoperability come first. Cultural roots are early blogging, RSS, XMPP, open standards culture and the early activist web. They are guardians of continuity.
Protocol Purists / Engineering Minimalists (Sometimes overlap with greybeards but culturally distinct.) Tend to dismiss governance and social design as “out of scope.” and tus risk reproducing libertarian-style “neutral infrastructure” assumptions. They protect the protocol but sometimes ignore the ecosystem.
NGO Pragmatists / Institutionalizers (This is likely most of current leadership structures. Think the Fediverse needs to be legible to regulators, funders, and #mainstreaming users. There cultural roots are foundation models, EU funding ecosystems and digital rights etc. Motivationed by legitimacy, policy and funding stability (for them selves, and thus the system, with them running it). There power is they can unlock resources, build bridges outside tech circles and reduce chaos perception. But suffer from very bad bind spots that affectively block by depoliticising radical roots, (un)intentionally reproduce top-down structures and prioritise optics over native needs. They are trying to make fediverse “safe enough” for mainstream adoption.
Grassroots Builders / Commons Activists (Closest to #OMN framing.) Build and support the Fediverse as a social movement, not just infrastructure with native paths. Community governance and mutual aid are core so technology must serve social transformation. Roots sprin from early Indymedia, anarchist/left activist tech, free culture and early autonomous networks. Tere mission is native to te fedives of reclaiming media infrastructure, resist #dotcons capture to rebuild collective spaces. They bring real world experience of community building, lived experimentation and resilience outside funding cycles. But have there own blind spots with resource scarcity, fragmentation and continuing mess internal ideological conflict. They carry the original radical energy but struggle with institutional power.
Instance Admins (The Hidden Power Layer) are often overlooked but crucial. Thy are te fedivers, keep servers running, manage moderation chaos, with ractical solutions over ideology spiky or fluffy. Being motivated by sustainability, reducing burnout and keeping communities healthy. Tey ave the only real operational experience and work with native distributed authority. But tend to be to blind to organising as a collective political voice as there influence is diffuse. If they coordinated, they could reshape governance overnight.
Commercial Entrants / Platform Builders with the #NGO paths becoming more powerful. They tend to a narrow non native view of the fediverse as infrastructure for scalable products and interoperability as competitive advantage. Examples would be venture-backed or startup-aligned platforms motivated by growth, monetisation models compatible with federation and early positioning before governance can settle. They have power and voice due to resources, UX focus and marketing reach. But being non native they lack “users”. Tey are blind to the risk of slow platform capture and are anatanistic to the tension with grassroots values. They introduce gravity toward mainstream web patterns.
The Silent Majority (Users) are often ignored in governance discussions. In this #NGO push they are seen as needing usable, safe social spaces and not deeply ideological. This leads to adoption patterns shaping the ecosystem more than debates do witch deeper cultural fault lines.
Large Instance Admins (network gravity), they are admins of large or historically central servers, culturally influential communities have some power with federation choices shape network topology. Blocking decisions define social boundaries. They can indirectly decide which communities thrive, what norms spread and what software gains adoption. No vote, but impact.
Narrative Shapers (discourse power) mostly the more fluffy, #NO frendly bloggers, long-term fediverse personalities, visible commentators and conference speakers define what problems are “real”, what language becomes default and try and define what counts as native and reasonable. Some example might be shifting conversation from “openweb” to “socialweb”, framing decentralisation as safety vs freedom. These narratives shape funding, developer interest, and user expectations.
Funders (hard coded steering) for most people this is slight and not seen as direct control, for others more strong directional influence. Examples include: grant bodies, research funding ecosystems, EU-aligned digital infrastructure programs. On balance the vast majority of this funding goes to corrupt insiders and is thus simply poured directly down the drain. But the stuff that works, like #NLnet has real power, funding doesn’t dictate outcomes, but it decides which problems get resourced to indirectly defines priorities. But if this is not balenced by social governance funding it quietly becomes invisible.
Bridge Figures (social connectors) are hugely underestimated. They are people with experience across multiple factions of dev + activist hybrids, long-term organisers and translators between tech and social communities. There power is in balanceing conflict, helping which conversations cross boundaries and legitimize ideas by engagement. Without them, silos harden.
Default Software UX (silent governance) The interface itself shapes behaviour were Mastodon UX norms influence culture more than policy debates, defaults create expectations. Examples: content warnings, quote-post absence/presence, moderation tools. UX becomes governance.
Momentum and path dependency is possibly the biggest hidden power. Once a protocol interpretation, a moderation norm or a deployment pattern gains early momentum… it becomes hard to change, regardless of governance discussions.
These factions aren’t just political, they divide along deeper axes.
Infrastructure vs Movement. Protocol purists + many greybeards → infrastructure-first. Grassroots → movement-first.
Legibility vs Autonomy. NGOs seek legibility for funding/policy. grassroots value messiness and effective autonomy.
Governance vs Emergence. institutionalists want hard (oftern invisable) governance frameworks. Others believe governance should emerge (visably) organically
The insight meany people miss is that the biggest conflict is NOT what they might think left vs right or tech vs social, it is people trying to make the fediverse safe for scale vs People trying to keep it open enough for transformation. Both believe they are saving it. This is where things actually make sense, because formal governance in the fediverse is weak compared to influence networks. Most frustration comes from people arguing about structures that “don’t actually hold power”, while missing the forces that shape direction.
We need a more realistic map of the unspoken power dynamics shaping the fediverse, these are not generaly official roles – they’re influence patterns. Maintainers as gatekeepers (code gravity), who are core maintainers of major projects (Mastodon, Akkoma/Pleroma forks, Pixelfed, Lemmy, PeerTube, etc.). Protocol implementers of what ships shapes reality. What doesn’t get merged doesn’t exist. without formal authority they define the roadmap simply by deciding what is worth implementing. This has a strong hidden effect that governance debates often become irrelevant if maintainers don’t prioritise them. Some example dynamics are social governance features get ignored because they’re “not technical”. UX decisions shaping culture without explicit discussion etc.
The core dynamic that is hidden is most people assume power = foundations or organisations. Where the reality is power = maintainers + large instances + narratives + funding gravity. Formal structures, and the little native governance we have mostly follow these forces, not in any way balance them in.
So were dose the stress come from and why this creates frustration. Grassroots actors often see decisions emerging without any transparent process, norms solidifying without any affective debate and institutions appearing to “take over”.
Where institutional actors see chaos without coordination and feel deep phsicological, and self serving need for pressure to stabilise. Both misidentify where decisions actually originate. The deepest unspoken divide is people are defending different emotional survival strategies, until this is recognised, discussions loop endlessly.
What do you think, if you think about this at all?
Let’s look at an example of how belief systems shape political reality. Some people still deliberately conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This confusion isn’t neutral, it shapes how discussions are framed, who gets silenced, and which political paths remain possible. Let’s be clear:
Anti-Semitism is racism. It targets Jewish people as a people. It is hate, exclusion, and violence, and it must be opposed wherever it appears.
Anti-Zionism is political opposition to a state ideology and to actions carried out in its name, particularly when that ideology manifests as ethnic nationalism, apartheid, and genocide. Criticising state power and political structures is not racism; it is part of political accountability.
Much of the current framing is not about honest thinking, it is about strategy. By collapsing these two terms together, critics of state violence can be delegitimised without engaging with what they are actually saying. Debate is shifted away from material realities and toward defensive arguments about identity.
We need to refuse this mess-making. Instead of getting trapped in endless semantic battles, shift the focus toward power and consequences of who holds power? Who is being harmed? What structures enable that harm? Then, how do we build paths toward justice that do not reproduce oppression?
Moments of political rupture – scandals, revelations, shifting alliances – expose how #mainstreaming narratives are constructed and maintained. When these moments occur, people become more open to questioning “common sense.” That creates opportunities for real social change and challenge.
The goal is not to win rhetorical battles inside broken frames, but to move discussion toward ethical clarity and collective responsibility. Focus on actions, structures, and outcomes, not weaponised labels designed to shut conversation down.
This dynamic reflects a broader pattern. People often live inside belief systems that function like religions, even when they present themselves as purely rational. These systems shape what appears normal, possible, or inevitable, and define which questions are allowed.
Modern economics is one of the most powerful of these belief systems. Despite presenting itself as objective and scientific, much contemporary economic thinking has only a tenuous connection to physical reality – ecosystems, material limits, social relationships, and lived community experience. Instead, it operates through abstract models centred on growth, competition, and individual optimisation. These abstractions become controlling myths of markets become invisible gods, “efficiency” becomes moral virtue and growth becomes salvation.
Humans have always created symbolic systems to understand complexity. The problem emerges when these systems detach from the material world. When that happens, distorted decision-making becomes inevitable. Ethnic cleansing, #climatechaos, ecological breakdown, social fragmentation, and recurring conflict are not anomalies, they are predictable outcomes of a worldview that treats nature and community as externalities.
One of the deepest misunderstandings reinforced by liberal ideology is the belief that society is simply the sum of independent individuals. In reality, the individual – their freedom, reason, and identity – emerges from social relationships. Strong individuals are produced by healthy collective structures, not opposed to them.
This insight sits at the heart of anarchist and commons-based traditions, and it was central to the original spirit of the #openweb. This is why the open web – and #OMN – matter, they represent a break from economic fundamentalism because they treat infrastructure as commons rather than commodities by prioritises interoperability, shared stewardship, and collective agency over enclosure and extraction.
By strong contrast, the #mainstreaming#closedweb (#dotcons platforms) reflects economic dogma of enclosure instead of openness, surveillance instead of trust and platform ownership instead of shared governance leading to individual extraction instead of collective flourishing.
The tragedy is that many “alternatives” risk reproducing the same patterns because they inherit the same assumptions. This is why #OMN matters, it isn’t simply another technical project, it is a shifting of the underlying social logic from product thinking to ecosystem thinking, from institutional control to community process (#4opens), from scale as success to resilience as success, to move from abstract models to lived social reality
If modern economics functions as a religion disconnected from nature, then grassroots digital commons are a form of re-grounding. They reconnect technology with human needs, ecological awareness, and collective agency.
We need to be composting the myths. Across both examples – geopolitical narratives and economic ideology – the task is similar: compost the myths. Recognise which assumptions no longer serve us so that new forms can grow. That means questioning inherited narratives, rejecting reactionary nationalism, and building alternatives rooted in shared stewardship and open process.
The #openweb, at its best, is not nostalgia or utopian fantasy. It is a recognition that healthy systems grow from real communities and collective care. And perhaps the most radical step is simply this: step outside our inherited belief systems long enough to remember that we built the web together – and we can rebuild it differently.
It’s interesting to think about the idea of good and bad faith when dealing with people in change and challenge interactions. If you spend time in life doing activism, this will be an ongoing, unpleasant reacuringing relationship. When pushing aside, pushing back #mainstreaming there will be a lot of bad faith coming at you, your good faith is the best and likely only defence.
Across Europe, large-scale “mainstreaming” tech projects are increasingly shaping the future of the digital commons. From infrastructure initiatives to sovereign cloud strategies and federated social technologies, the EU tech stack is becoming more organised, more funded, and more institutionalised.
On the surface, this looks like progress. But history suggests that without active counter-currents, #mainstreaming inevitably drifts toward bureaucracy, risk-aversion, and quiet capture by institutional and corporate interests. The problem is almost all current European tech funding is poured down the drain of soft painless corruption.
This is why a small but intentional flow of funding toward grassroots, activist, and counter-cultural projects within #FOSS is not a luxury, it is essential infrastructure.
Innovation rarely if ever starts in the mainstream
Most genuinely transformative ideas in #FOSS and free software and #openweb did not originate from institutional programmes. They came from messy edges of volunteer collectives, activist media projects feed by autonomous spaces building #FOSS social infrastructure.
These environments allow experimentation without needing immediate legitimacy or scalability. They tolerate failure and contradiction, conditions that mainstream programmes often cannot. Without supporting these edge spaces, mainstream funding feeds an echo chamber that only produces incremental improvements, if any, to existing paradigms. Counter-currents are not only opposition; they are the ecosystem that generates future pathways.
Activism keeps governance honest
Institutional projects naturally optimise for stability, compliance, and reputation. This creates blind spots where needed difficult political questions get softened and avoided, governance becomes less participatory over time leading to decisions shift toward funders and professional stakeholders. Activist communities provide necessary friction by asking uncomfortable questions about power concentration and co-option by #NGO and corporate actors.
This friction is often misinterpreted as negativity or disruption. In reality, it acts as a corrective force that keeps projects aligned with the original European values, and the values of the #openweb and #FOSS. Without activist pressure, mainstreaming tends toward the same #closedweb patterns it now claims to be resisting.
Diversity of approach is a resilience strategy
A healthy ecosystem requires multiple approaches operating simultaneously, with institutional scaling projects in balance with community-led infrastructure. When funding flows only toward “safe” and easily measurable projects, the ecosystem loses adaptive capacity. Counter-currents provide alternative models and paths that become critical when dominant approaches fail. This is something repeatedly demonstrated in the history of internet development. Funding these spaces is therefore not charity; it is long-term risk management.
The current gap: refusal to fund counter-currents
Some current alternative funding bodies – including initiatives like #NLnet – have done valuable work supporting open technology. However, when funding structures avoid explicitly supporting activist or counter-cultural paths, a structural imbalance emerges. By prioritising technical outputs without investing in the social and political ecosystems that sustain them, funding breaks down, reinforcing the same dynamics that previously enabled enclosure and platform capture. Technical neutrality is not neutral. It implicitly favours existing power structures.
A truly balanced funding flow would intentionally support more grassroots organising capacity to build activist infrastructure projects with working governance experimentation like the #OGB to open spaces to shape community memory and historical continuity. Without this, mainstream funding cannot claim to represent the full health of the #FOSS ecosystem.
Why this matters now
The European tech stack is at a turning point. As public funding grows, so does the risk of institutionalising the very problems open technology originally emerged to resist. Activism is not only an external threat to mainstream projects, it is also a feedback system.
Supporting counter-currents prevents stagnation and helps to surface blind spots early by keeping alignment with public values. It’s needed to keep the tech ecosystem genuinely open rather than merely #NGO branded as such. The simple principle is if mainstream funding only supports what already looks safe and legitimate, it stops being an engine of innovation and becomes a mechanism of consolidation.
To keep the #openweb alive, we need funding flows that intentionally include the messy edges – the activists, the grassroots builders, and the experiments that don’t yet fit neat categories.
Not because they are comfortable, because they are necessary.
And to tell the truth we need a better balance of useful verses funding poured down the drain #NLnet#EU#NGI#NGIzero and likely more, please post in the comments.
Everywhere we look – what we see, touch, and use – we are living inside systems shaped by decades of economic and technological assumptions. This isn’t only something happening “out there”. It has been normalised and internalised over the last forty years.
The dominance of #stupidindividualism, combined with rigid economic dogma, influenced how we design technology, how we organise communities, and how we imagine progress itself. The outcomes are now starkly visible: #climatechaos, social fragmentation, and a weakening of collective sense-making.
The internet reflects this reality. Online and offline are no longer separate spaces; they feed back and reinforce each other. Recognising this isn’t only about blame, it’s more importantly about understanding the terrain we’re all navigating. These are the technology limits of the current path and why we continue to repeat familiar patterns. New platforms emerge, new interfaces are launched, yet the underlying values remain unchanged. The result does feel like endless churn to people who notice, innovation that rearranges surfaces while leaving deeper structures intact.
This isn’t simply the fault of individuals or communities. Many developers, especially within #FOSS and the #fediverse, are actively trying to build alternatives. But the broader ecosystem still pushes toward centralisation, scaling, and extraction because those are the dominant incentives of the wider paths.
So recognising our #geekproblem isn’t about rejecting technical culture – it’s about expanding it. Technical excellence alone cannot solve social problems without grounding in alt collective needs and lived social realities. This is what the #openweb means, it’s more than #blinded nostalgia for the early internet. It represents a shared direction many communities are already moving toward.
The #openweb is an internet where #4opens information is accessible regardless of platform or location, content can be shared, linked, and reused, participation is not gated by proprietary control. It’s basic: open data, open source, open standards, and open processes.
The growth of the Fediverse demonstrates that alternatives like these are possible. Decentralised social networks, community-run servers, and cooperative governance models show glimpses of a healthier digital ecosystem. Yet within these paths, tensions remain between “native” grassroots values and pressures toward #NGO#mainstreaming and power politics institutionalisation.
For this space to grow, we need to keep moving beyond false choices. On institutional paths, many proposed solutions focus solely on regulation or institutional reform, imagining that better rules will fix systemic problems. While governance matters, relying exclusively on top-down solutions risks becoming another form of dependency to add to the mess.
Another path exists alongside institutional change: horizontal, grassroots approaches rooted in #DIY practice, #4opens shared infrastructure. This path is imperfect and often messy, but it keeps agency within communities rather than outsourcing change to distant structures.
The goal is not purity, it is balance, the #OMN approach grows from this perspective. Grassroots, #DIY, non-corporate, human-scale, not disruption for its own sake, not scaling driven by venture logic. Instead, building social technology that serve collective needs while respecting individual agency. Many people within #FOSS and the Fediverse are already working toward these goals, even if they use different languages. The opportunity now is to deepen collaboration, connect projects that share values, and strengthen the social foundations alongside the technical ones.
So the path we need is about finding each other, it’s the path we made work for a while then failed on socialhub, so I need to repeat, the question isn’t whether alternatives exist, they do. The challenge is finding alignment among people who are already trying to move in similar directions, but feel isolated or fragmented.
Who recognises that technology must serve communities rather than extract from them. If you see value in grassroots, cooperative approaches to technology – if you believe the #openweb is still worth building – then the invitation is simple. Stop churning, start building. Who is ready to move beyond endless reinvention toward shared infrastructure and shared purpose?
Seeds, Safety, and the Chicken-and-Egg Problem – A Q&A on Practical Building vs Intellectual #Blocking. This explores a recurring tension in grassroots technology projects: the gap between practical historical paths and fresh “intellectual” critique, it reflects on a broader patterns seen in #openweb, #FOSS, and #DIY spaces.
Q: What is the “shared path” and why describe it as a seed?
A: The shared path is a practical response to repeated historical failure. It is not a finished solution, a moral demand, or a complete alternative system. It begins as a seed, something small, imperfect, and grounded. If you judge a seed by whether it is already a tree, nothing will ever grow. The idea is to start building despite uncertainty and allow structure to emerge rooted organically through practice.
Q: What is the main critique of this “seed” approach?
A: Critics argue that metaphors like seeds and growth avoid addressing concrete mechanisms. They focus on first-step effects: What signals are being sent? Who carries risk or unpaid labour? What moral pressures are created? What happens when survivability is deferred? From this perspective, issues must be addressed at the beginning rather than grown from the seed.
Q: Why does this debate often become circular?
A: Because both sides are asking different questions. Practical builders ask: Where do the resources come from to implement safety before anything exists? Critics ask: How do we prevent harm if we begin without safeguards? Without answering the resource question, discussions loop endlessly between ethics and feasibility.
Q: What is the “chicken-and-egg” problem here?
A: Many grassroots projects face a structural paradox: You need resources, tools, and commitment to build sustainable alternatives. But those resources only appear after something exists and demonstrates use value, agenst mainstreaming pushback Waiting for perfect conditions prevents starting; starting without resources has risks, but it’s the only thing that can grow change and challenge.
Q: What work is actually happening in practice?
A: Practical work often remains messy, distributed, and unpaid. Examples include: Supporting student journalists in rebooting grassroots media projects like Oxford #Indymedia. Motivating unfunded technical communities to collaborate on shared codebases such as #indymediaback. Maintaining ongoing organisational and community infrastructure through long-term volunteer labour. These efforts are naturally invisible and impossible to summarise because they work organically rather than following formal project structures.
Q: Why is documentation itself a source of conflict?
A: Critics ask for clear summaries or structured documentation of ongoing work. Builders simply see this as additional unpaid labour imposed on already stretched contributors. External demands that assume others should organise information for them, creates friction between expectations of accessibility and the working realities of #4opens and #DIY grassroots work.
A: In #DIY culture, participation is active rather than observational. If someone believes something needs improvement – documentation, tools, funding guides – the expectation is that they step in and contribute rather than stand outside only pointing critique. Critique without participation is too often lazy negative pressure rather than constructive help on “native” DIY paths.
Q: Is this simply a disagreement about ethics?
A: Not entirely. Both sides often share ethical concerns. The deeper disagreement is about sequence: Should, impossible and irrelevant in a practical sense, safety and compensation frameworks exist before building begins? Or can these frameworks emerge better through #DIY messy real-world working practice?
Q: What is the takeaway?
A: Grassroots building requires balancing, ethical awareness and practical starting points. Intellectual critique can help identify risks, but when detached from material constraints it too often unintentionally blocks action at best or turn into trolling at worst. Likewise, practical work can benefit from reflection, but cannot wait for perfect theoretical clarity.
The challenge is to compost both approaches into something that moves forward.
The individual, their freedom, and their capacity for reason are products of social relationships, not independent origins. Society is not built from isolated individuals; individuals arise from shared culture, history, and collective life. As society grows richer and more humane, individuals gain the conditions needed for deeper development and freedom emerges from this shared foundation.
What’s really at stake is power. The shift has to be away from private ownership and toward the commons – not just in licensing, but in governance, culture, and decision-making. The whole #OMN project is grounded in this understanding. It’s about building shared infrastructure that people can actually use, shape, and grow trust.
One of the great ironies of many “alternative” spaces is that people believe they’re resisting power, yet by locking everything down – secret decisions, closed processes, gatekeeping – they end up recreating the systems they claim to oppose. The result is stasis, nothing moves or grows, everything fragments.
Paranoia is one of the biggest blocking forces in alt-tech and radical spaces. It breeds mistrust, isolation, and internal sabotage, making collective action almost impossible. Some caution is necessary, we’re not naïve, but when paranoia becomes the default posture, it hardens into control. At that point, it stops being defensive and starts being corrupting.
The #4opens is a direct antidote to this. Transparency punctures paranoia. When decisions, processes, and networks are open, there’s less space for suspicion to fester. Trust isn’t built through secrecy or technical cleverness; it’s built through visible, accountable practice over time. Open process beats “good intentions” every time.
This is also why letting technical people make final product decisions is a mistake, overemphasizing technology then underplaying the social problems we’re actually trying to solve. We end up designing better mousetraps without ever asking whether we’re even trying to catch mice. Tech becomes the point, rather than a tool.
This is where the #fashernista problem kicks in, being seen to hold the correct stance replaces doing the work. But staying “right” while nothing changes is another form of failure. If we want alternatives that function, we have to move past paranoia, reopen flows, and accept that trust is something you build, not something you secure with walls.
The uncomfortable truth is that it’s easy to be “right” in theory. It’s much harder to take part in the compromises that building anything real requires. Most people prefer the comfort of ideological purity over the messiness of collective practice, especially when dealing with complex social truths. That’s the trap.
#OMN is often critiqued as if it were a finished system, a moral framework, or an alternative economy. It is none of those things. We need to be clear about scope, sequence, and intent if discussion is going to move forward instead of circling the same ground.
#OMN is a commons-first, tool-building project. It exists to create shared infrastructure, processes, and cultural practices that can grow non-extractive media and communication. It prioritizes shared ownership, open process (#4opens), and reducing capture in order to build the needed public-first infrastructure. It’s about creating conditions, not declaring outcomes.
It’s an early-phase project, an affinity-building space to create tools and governance to reconnect fragmented activist and media histories. It is not claiming to already provide economic survivability, stable long-term livelihoods, or a full replacement for existing systems. Confusing the step with the destination is the root of most disagreement.
It’s grounded in lived historical practice. #OMN grows out of more than 30 years of real projects – Indymedia, grassroots media, squatting and DIY cultures, trust-based networks – and a clear view of where #NGO-driven paths have failed. This history matters. The path is not speculative theory, it’s an attempt to compost what worked, acknowledge what failed, and try again with better tools.
That’s based on a simple historical reality, society does not pay people to challenge itself. Early change is driven by passion, not wages, and support structures emerge after commons exist, not before. This isn’t a moral claim, it’s an observation drawn from experience. #OMN is also a space where tone is a process tool. Friction is used to slow things down, open space for challenge, and form affinity where none yet exists. This is messy by design, not a finished social contract.
We don’t set out to solve how everyone is paid, how risk is evenly distributed, or how long-term security is guaranteed. These are unsolved problems, not denied ones. #OMN exists because these tools do not yet exist, so expecting it to already provide them misunderstands its scope and phase. Participation is voluntary, alignment is practical, not moral. Funding may be used tactically, but OMN is not structured around chasing it.
This is not a safe, smooth, or finished space. The path is unfinished, uneven, and sometimes uncomfortable. If a project has to be safe, stable, and fully funded before it can exist, it will never challenge anything.
The core misunderstanding is that the #OMN is judged for failing to deliver something it has never claimed to already be. What we are doing is building the tools that make survivability possible later, without reproducing the failures that keep repeating. That work is slow, messy, and incomplete – because it has to be.
The shared path is a practical response to repeated historical failure. It is not a promise, a moral demand, or a finished alternative. If you judge a seed by whether it is already a tree, you will never grow anything.
Why groups matter, in our “common sense” we like to pretend society is made up of strong, independent individuals who freely choose everything about their lives. That story is comforting, but it’s also mostly false, humans are group creatures first. People don’t start as individuals. We are born into families, cultures, languages, histories. Our values, assumptions, and sense of what’s “normal” are learned socially long before we ever get a chance to reflect on them. Groups aren’t an add-on to human life – they’re the foundation.
Individual identity is hard work, as modern culture tells us we must be ourselves, define our own path, build a unique identity. But doing that alone is exhausting, being an “individual” means constant self-definition, self-presentation, self-justification. You’re never finished as you’re always proving who you are, to employers, platforms, institutions, and peers.
That permanent uncertainty is what people mean when they talk about burnout, anxiety, and imposter syndrome. Groups reduce that pressure, as belonging to a group shares the load, with values, purpose, norms, responsibility. You don’t have to invent everything from scratch, you’re part of something that existed before you and will continue after you. This isn’t about conformity, it’s about being human, support and continuity.
The current #deathcult myth of pure individual freedom, where individuals are fully free and self-made #KISS serves power. When people are isolated, all problems look personal instead of structural, failure feels like a moral flaw and collective solutions disappear. You can’t organise if everyone thinks and acts as if they’re alone.
Healthy groups vs. toxic groups, yep, groups aren’t automatically good. Some are rigid, exclusionary and authoritarian. Healthy groups are porous and open to change, allow disagreement, are based on trust, not fear and exist to serve their members, not control them. The solution to bad groups isn’t no groups – it’s better ones.
Why this matters for media and the web? The #openweb wasn’t built by isolated individuals chasing personal brands. It grew out of horizontal’ish communities, shared tools, and mutual aid. What broke it, was pushing of individual status, platforms replacing communities then metrics replacing relationships. Projects like #OMN are about rebuilding group-based publishing, shared infrastructure, and collective voice, not amplifying lone influencers.
In short, (stupid) Individualism puts people in a permanent liminal state – alone, unstable, competing. Groups give people grounding, belonging, continuity, and the ability to act together. If we want social change, resilient media, and a future beyond the current mess, we on balance don’t need better individuals, we need better groups.
I proposed a long time ago that #openweb is a less tribal, more expansive framing than #fediverse socially and technically. It’s also #nothingnew, which is honestly a breath of fresh air. We can (and should) use both terms, but if we want meaningful change and challenge to the #mainstreaming mess, we need to foreground the more generic one.
Predictably, this gets pushback from two directions: the non-political #FOSS crowd, and the mainstreaming crew. And yes, when you bring #NGO behaviour into the #fediverse, there’s going to be friction. Try being #openweb-native on this, please.
People are going to keep doing self- and socially-destructive things. That’s a human problem, not a branding one. But the language we choose does shape how we respond to it.
One of the reasons we use a #4opens process is to balance the reality that people often arrive with strong opinions before understanding the history, context, or existing work. The process isn’t there to exclude anyone, it’s there to slow things down just enough so people can orient themselves before trying to reshape what already exists.
At the moment this only works partially, because some people still interpret being asked to explore existing materials as dismissal. For example “You have sent me on a ride through Mastodon posts and two repos while not providing direct answers.”
What may feel like dismissal is actually part of a #DIY open process. The intention is to encourage people to engage with the work already done so conversations can move forward from shared context rather than restarting the same debates repeatedly.
Similarly: “Why assume blog archaeology is the right approach instead of presenting everything in a more processed way?” In grassroots projects, documentation is often messy, organic, and evolving rather than packaged into clean summaries. Exploring this material isn’t busywork, it’s a way to understand the social and historical layers that shape the project. Without that grounding, discussions can unintentionally repeat old loops to propose changes that have already been explored.
And when people say: “Most people don’t have time or energy for this.” That’s a real constraint, but it also highlights the core challenge. Open, collective projects rely on participants investing some effort to understand shared context. Without that, the burden shifts onto existing contributors to repeatedly re-explain the basics, which keeps stalling progress.
The aim here is not gatekeeping or dismissal. It’s #KISS: keep the process simple, open, and grounded in shared effort. If something needs improving – documentation, summaries, onboarding – the most constructive path in a #DIY culture is to step in and help build that improvement together.
The new #NGO generation are in the process of the second sell-out of the #openweb. These people are eather new or are comeing back to this “native” space, have stepped stright into running the current reboot after the original grassroots path burned out and was pushed aside. This new “NGO generation” holds strong views, their perspective, is that they already lived through a catastrophic failure once, and they are determined not to repeat there version of it.
Their mostly blinded story goes something like this: “We tried radical openness, tried informal governance, trusting culture to hold things together, It didn’t survive scale, money, or power. The result was capture by corporations far worse than anything we imagined, we can’t afford another naïve collapse.” This trauma – not betrayal – is their common sense starting point. Many of these people genuinely believe they were burned by “idealism”.
From this NGO insider view, they did watched Flickr get eaten by Yahoo, Twitter go from a playful commons to authoritarian infrastructure, and Facebook hollow “community” into extraction. They watched # fashernista volunteer governance implode under harassment, burnout, and capture, but what they did not see was the intolernce of the internal imploshern.
From that self inflicted wreckage, they did not conclude that capitalism is the problem, they concluded that informality does not scale and gets eaten alive by capitalism. So when they hear words like commons, grassroots, trust-based, or we’ll figure it out as we go, what they actually hear is: “We’re about to lose everything again, but faster this time.” That fear shapes everything in the current takeover path they push us down in the Fediverse.
They, think they are OK, and see themselves as harm reducers, rather than visionaries or builders of a new world. In their mindset, “real alternative talk” is too often how bad actors slip in. Their self-image is closer to #mainstreaming than the alt they are trying to manage, thus are think inside the current system, the alt is working to change and challange.
Platforms exist – you can’t wish them away
Capital exists – you can’t abolish it from a policy office
States exist – and they will regulate you whether you like it or not
So their question isn’t “What world do we want?” It’s “How do we prevent the worst outcomes in the world we actually have?” That’s why their tools are regulation, standards bodies, foundations, charters, boards of the great and the good (or at least the less bad). To them, this is adult responsibility, not what we see in the alt as sell-out.
So why do NGO paths feel “inevitable” to them? They believe power only listens to things that look like power, that, what matters, is that governments won’t talk to messy collectives, anonymous affinity groups, rotating stewards and informal federations like our native #Fediverse. Funders won’t fund things without legal entities, without accountability structures or paths without named decision-makers. Media won’t quote “the commons”, “the network”, “some people on the Fediverse”. So to them the path needs foundations, and boards, which aren’t ideological to them, they’re blind to this only seeing simple translation layers in there work.
At their best, they see themselves as “Standing between chaotic grassroots energy and hostile institutions, translating one to the other, so the whole thing doesn’t get crushed.” From inside this framing, NGOs aren’t buffers, they’re shields, a polite way of saying #blocking. Where they are partly right – and where it goes wrong – is that yes, some of their fears are real. Millions of people depend on existing infrastructure, sudden collapse hurts the most vulnerable first, and power vacuums often produce authoritarianism or monopoly – not freedom.
Their nightmare scenario is not enclosure, its collapse followed by something worse. So aim for incremental change, stability (for themselves and their class), and institutional continuity, even when it’s ugly. This is dressed, with radical lipstick up as legitimacy, but, sadly, it functions as structural #blocking.
This part is uncomfortable, but central, they marginalise grassroots voices, and believe this is justified. They sincerely believe grassroots underestimate adversaries and overestimate culture, so will collapse under conflict by refusing compromise needed for staying power. They tell themselves “We’ve seen this movie. Passion burns hot, then disappears. Institutions are what remain when people move on.” So when they sideline grassroots projects as “naïve” or “unscalable”, they think they’re being pragmatic, not abusive. In there common sense they don’t see exclusion, they see triage, were they are the doctors saying who lives and dies.
Where the worldviews break is both sides are responding to real history, they just draw opposite lessons from the same wreckage. What the #NGO crew don’t see – and why this keeps looping – is that their “stability” reproduces enclosure, their “common sense” legitimacy reproduces hierarchy and professionalism produces exclusion, the obsession with safety produces stagnation.
From inside these sell-out paths, survival feels like success with funded projects, policy wins, seats at tables and published NGO frameworks. The tragedy is that both sides are trying to prevent disaster, but they are optimising against different disasters. Capitalism is very good at rewarding one of those fears while quietly #blocking the other.
From the NGO side, grassroots looks reckless, from the grassroots side, the NGO crew looks complicit. Both are partly right – but the power imbalance matters. The NGO crew controls: funding, platforms, mainstream legitimacy and narratives. Which means their fear shapes reality far more than the real hardworking people actually building change and challenge at the grassroots.
Some of the lies that keep this messy system running are “We are neutral stewards, not power holders.” This is a claim to power with NGOs and foundations acting as if they merely facilitate and convene. But they control funding flows, agenda setting, who is “in the room”, which projects are “serious” and finally which histories are remembered. That is, #KISS, power.
They must deny this because admitting it would require accountability to the commons, which they structurally cannot offer. Their accountability flows upward to funders and states, not downward to people. So when challenged, they say “we’re just trying to help” – while continuing to decide. “We represent the ecosystem.” They don’t. They represent whoever didn’t leave there process and whoever depends on their funding to make them stay.
Non-participation is treated as absence, not refusal. Blocking, muting, and burnout are erased. Their legitimacy depends on being the voice, because if they admit they’re just one actor among many, their seat evaporates. Reports about “the community” are published without recall, veto, or dissent.
“Anyone can participate.” But participation requires unpaid labour, institutional literacy, polite tone-policing, time abundance, and tolerance for bureaucratic process. Then the exclusion is reframed as personal failure. When grassroots actors disappear, the story is that “They disengaged.” Never “We made engagement unbearable.”
Formal governance, regulation, and the illusion of control is a dogma that formal structures prevents capture, its an old lie. Formalisation doesn’t prevent capture, it defines the capture interface. Once power is legible (roles, chairs, processes), it becomes fundable, lobbyable, and replaceable.
Informal power is hard to seize, formal power is easy. NGOs point to “best practice governance” while real decisions happen off-record. Likewise, regulation is not a substitute for collective ownership. Regulation manages behaviour, not incentives, shareholder obligation remains, extraction remains, enclosure remains – just slower and more polite. Abolition or ownership transfer is politically unthinkable from their position, so guardrails are celebrated while the underlying model stays untouched.
This is about scale, collapse, and conflict “Scale is necessary to matter” is another unexamined belief. Most harm on the internet comes from scale, most resilience comes from multiplicity, redundancy, and smallness. #NGOs chase scale because that’s how they survive – while dismissing small systems that actually work. Likewise, they claim “we prevent collapse” hides the truth: they mostly prevent transition, stabilises dying models long enough for capital to reconfigure and re-enter. Everything feels “temporarily stuck”, for years in there world.
And finally “Conflict harms the movement.” but in realerty, conflict is how power becomes visible. Suppressing it doesn’t remove it, it pushes it into backchannels, exits, forks, burnout, and silence. Yes, conflict scares funders, so dissent becomes “toxicity”, and #mainstreaming consensus is quietly enforced.
The deepest contradiction “We can midwife the commons without becoming its governors.” This has never been true, organisations that control resources, define legitimacy, and speak externally are exercising power, whether they admit it or not. Smiling NGOs are not outside power, they are simply power with better PR. They say they exist because they don’t trust people. They say they represent people. You cannot hold both without lying to yourself.
Compost is the right metaphor as you can’t argue someone out of a frame that keeps their institutions alive, you can only make that frame less central by growing something that actually works. That’s what the #OMN path is about – if people build it, support it, and let it grow in the spaces we work to open up, we can become the change and challenge we actually need.
The #Fediverse as a lesson, it doesn’t need representation, it needs narration (many voices), aggregation (not unification) and refusal (to be spoken for). Every attempt to “represent” it recentralises it, makes it legible to power, and prepares it for capture. So the current move, the Fediverse isn’t being captured by villains, it’s being domesticated by caretakers. And history tells us enclosure doesn’t come screaming – it comes with minutes, frameworks, and funding rounds.
So, who are today’s bad guys? The corporate eliteits, the fossil fuel barons, the billionaire class, and their pet politicians. The #neoliberals who chant ‘TINA’ while the world burns. The green-washers and compromisers who whisper that change must be ‘reasonable’ while we march off a cliff.
Let’s be honest, we already lost metadata privacy. The #dotcons, the surveillance state, and the data brokers see everything. This isn’t a warning about what might happen, it’s the reality we live in today’s mess. In normal peoples lives every click, every message, every connection is tracked, logged, and monetised. There is no going back to the sealed, closed-off privacy of a pre-digital era. Not legally, not technically. The dream of private digital spaces was always fragile, and today it is gone in the #mainstreaming
So what can we do? The answer is radical, counterintuitive, and deeply political: we open the metadata bag, to make the hidden flows of power visible. Every algorithm, every tracking pipeline, every corporate and state extraction point should be exposed, audited, and understood. Transparency becomes a shield against abuse because secrecy is the tool that enforces power asymmetry. We stop pretending that corporate surveillance is acceptable, or that peer-to-peer transparency is inherently dangerous. The logic flips: if everyone can see what is happening, then no one can hide exploitative behaviour behind opaque systems.
Yes, this is uncomfortable, radical transparency is not convenient, it forces us to confront how deeply control and extraction have penetrated our lives. It means admitting we’ve been stripped naked by Google, Amazon, and the NSA. But in a world where we are already exposed, radical transparency becomes the preferred path to justice.
The question is no longer “how do we hide?” – because hiding is largely impossible, but “how do we share wisely, and govern openly?” In practical terms, this means:
Open metadata protocols that let communities see what is being collected and how it is used.
Collective oversight of platforms and systems, ensuring that algorithms are auditable and accountable.
Peer-to-peer transparency, where participants in networks control their data and can trace its flow.
Commons-based governance, so that data isn’t captured by a few corporations or states, but managed in the public interest.
Outside often delusional #geekproblem ghettos, privacy as an individual, sealed-off right, is dead. But privacy as collective control over visibility is still possible. It’s not about hiding; it’s about choosing who sees, how it’s used, and under what paths.
The #OMN path treats transparency not as a threat, but as power to know, power to act, power to hold institutions accountable. By making information visible and governance participatory, we reclaim control in a world that has tried to strip it away. In short, in the age of the #dotcons, radical transparency is the new privacy. And it is not only possible, it is necessary.
Despite the constant #mainstreaming hype, the branding, and the trillions of dollars being poured into it, there is a simple reality that needs to be stated plainly: There is no intelligence in current “AI”, and there is no working path from today’s Large Language Models (#LLM) and Machine Learning (#ML) systems to anything resembling real, general intelligence.
What we are living through is not an intelligence revolution, it is a bubble – one we’ve seen many times before. The problem with this recurring mess is social, as a functioning democracy depends on the free flow of information. At its core, democracy is an information system, shared agreement that knowledge flows outward, to inform debate, shape collective decisions, and enable dissent. The wisdom of the many is meant to constrain the power of the few.
Over recent decades, we have done the opposite. We built ever more legal and digital locks to consolidate power in the hands of gatekeepers. Academic research, public data, scientific knowledge, and cultural memory have been locked behind paywalls and proprietary #dotcons platforms. The raw materials of our shared understanding, often created with public funding, have been enclosed, monetised, and sold back to the public for profit.
Now comes the next inversion. Under the banner of so-called #AI “training”, that same locked up knowledge has been handed wholesale to machines owned by a small number of corporations. These firms harvest, recombine, and extract value from it, while returning nothing to the commons. This is not a path to liberal “innovation”. It is the construction of anti-democratic, authoritarian power – and we do need to say this plainly.
A democracy that defers its knowledge to privately controlled algorithms becomes a spectator to its own already shaky governance. Knowledge is a public good, or democracy fails even harder than it already is.
Instead of knowledge flowing to the people, it flows upward into opaque black boxes. These closed custodians decide what is visible, what is profitable, and increasingly, what is treated as “truth”. This enclosure stacks neatly on top of twenty years of #dotcons social-control technologies, adding yet more layers of #techshit that we now need to compost.
Like the #dotcons before it, this was never really about copyright or efficiency. It is about whether knowledge is governed by openness or corporate capture, and therefore who knowledge is for. Knowledge is a #KISS prerequisite for any democratic path. A society cannot meaningfully debate science, policy, or justice if information is hidden behind paywalls and filtered through proprietary systems.
If we allow AI corporations to profit from mass appropriation of public knowledge while claiming immunity from accountability, we are choosing a future where access to understanding is governed by corporate power rather than democratic values.
How we treat knowledge – who can access it, who can build on it, and who is punished for sharing it – has become a direct test of our democratic commitments. We should be honest about what our current choices say about us in this ongoing mess.
The uncomfortable technical truth is this: general #AI is not going to emerge from current #LLM and ML systems – regardless of scale, compute, or investment. This has serious consequences. There is no coming step-change toward the “innovation” promised to investors, politicians, and corporate strategists, now or in any foreseeable future. The economic bubble beneath the hype matters because AI is currently propping up a fragile, fantasy economic reality. The return-on-investment investors are desperate for simply is not there.
So-called “AI agents”, beyond trivial and tightly constrained tasks, will default to being just more #dotcons tools of algorithmic control. Beyond that, thanks to the #geekproblem, they represent an escalating security nightmare, one in which attackers will always have the advantage over defenders, this #mainstreaming arms race will be endless and structurally unwinnable.
Yes, current #LLM systems do have useful applications, but they are narrow, specific, and limited. They do not justify the scale of capital being burned. There are no general-purpose deliverables coming to support the hype. At some point, the bubble will end – by explosion, implosion, or slow deflation.
What we can already predict, especially in the era of #climatechaos, is the lost opportunity cost. Vast financial, human, and institutional resources are being misallocated. When this collapses, the tech sector will be even more misshapen, and history suggests it will not be kind to workers, let alone the environment. This is the same old #deathcult pattern: speculation, enclosure, damage, and denial.
This moment is not about being “pro” or “anti” technology. It is about recognising that intelligence is social, contextual, embodied, and collective – and that no amount of #geekproblem statistical pattern-matching can replace that. It is about understanding that democracy cannot survive when knowledge is enclosed and mediated by #dotcons corporate capture beyond meaningful public control.
To recap: There is no intelligence in current #AI. There is no path to real AI from here. Pretending otherwise is not innovation – it is denial, producing yet more #techshit that we will eventually have to compost. Any sophist that argue otherwise need to be sacked if they arnt doing anything practical.
The only question is whether we use this moment to rebuild knowledge as a public good – or allow one more enclosure to harden around us. History – if it continues – will not be neutral about the answer.
In the current #mainstreaming mess, liberalism – like its phonetically similar cousin libertarianism – isn’t a coherent political philosophy. It’s a bundle of aesthetics and vibes that a professional class has used as a moral identity. A sacred story: free expression, a “marketplace of ideas,” rational debate gently shepherding society toward progress. In theory, in practice, it’s bullshit – and what happened around Gaza exposed this brutally clearly.
For the last few hundred years, liberal states used police violence, infiltration, and false-flag tactics to reframe domestic protests they dislike as “riots.” The script rarely changes: protesters are framed as disorderly, violent, irresponsible, which then forces the state to respond with tear gas, batons, rubber bullets, and mounted charges. And, conveniently, these protests are almost always leftist, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist. A coincidence, if you’re feeling generous. What made liberalism tolerable to many wasn’t the absence of violence – it was the aesthetics of regret that accompanied it.
“If only they hadn’t violated the permit.” “If only they hadn’t broken that window.” “You made us do this.”
This performance preserved the illusion that repression was an unfortunate exception rather than a structural feature of liberal governance. With anti-genocide protests, that illusion collapsed. There was no regret, just open state violence. Something about criticising Israel short-circuited the liberal self-image across the political class – from presidents to mayors to university administrators. The aesthetics of principle vanished the moment those principles became inconvenient.
So the violence was let loose, publicly and unapologetically. And then they went further, in the so-called “liberal” West, speech itself was criminalised. Anti-Zionist and anti-genocide speech was redefined as illegal, then extremist, then terrorist. Careers were ended, students were expelled, workers were fired, and entire movements were placed under sanction. This from an ideology famous for repeating: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Turns out that line was always branding, not belief.
If you look honestly at liberalism’s history, punishing speech isn’t an aberration – it’s a pattern. From the Red Scares to COINTELPRO to the violent suppression of student protests in the UK, liberal states have always crushed dissent when it threatened capital or empire. What’s new isn’t the repression. It’s how openly it’s now done, in an era of visible collapse.
To be clear, many good people, with good intentions, supported speech-regulating frameworks. Some limited, local improvements did come from this. But Gaza (and Trump II) stripped the illusion bare: these systems were never neutral, and they were never safe. When the state gets to define “hate speech,” it can define what we hate. When the state gets to define “terrorism,” it can define anyone as a terrorist.
Corporations followed smoothly, shifting definitions depending on who holds power. One day, it’s anti-genocide activists being fired. The next, it’s entire #DEI departments. Same tools, different targets. We need to say clearly: Anti-racist speech is not racist hate speech. Anti-genocide and anti-Zionist speech is not antisemitic.
The issue isn’t opposing hate. The issue is how quickly and comfortably liberals abandoned the full text of their own ideals the moment those ideals required material courage. This isn’t a Gaza-only problem, Gaza just stripped away the mask.
What we’re seeing, again, is a familiar: systems of oppression built with “good intentions” are repurposed into systems of repression under new management, same machinery, slightly different branding, same core users. That’s why this matters. Because the tools liberals built to “manage” society – to enforce compliance, regulate speech, and discipline dissent – are now being effortlessly redirected. And they will keep being redirected, because that’s what vertical systems do.
It’s almost like the current #mainstreaming isn’t how you liberate people. If you really want to understand how the actually-existing mess works, here’s the metaphor liberals refuse to face: You don’t deal with a mafia organisation by issuing fines per offence. You deal with it by dismantling the organisation – jailing leaders, seizing assets, and breaking the power structures entirely. Anything less is vibes, aesthetics, and the comforting fiction that this time the vertical system will behave itself.
