When we erased copyright enforcement for AI systems, we finally completed the Internet's split into two distinct areas:
– The Free-For-All Quarry: Anything reachable by an HTTP request is now unregulated public domain for corporations. Authorship, metadata and reciprocal obligations have been stripped away by automated AI scrapers.
– The Gated Communities: Anything behind a login and a strict user agreement is still protected by contract or trade secret law.
The dream of the open web where we used to publish freely to each other or to the global common good — trusting that intellectual property law would enforce a fair social contract — has essentially disappeared.
This toot is a diagnosis of a small shift, but thinking it’s trapped inside a narrow, liberal property lens on what the internet is and was supposed to be. What’s being described as a “split” between a Free-For-All quarry and gated communities is what happens when you assume the web was primarily about enforceable intellectual property contracts in the first place. That framing already accepts the #dotcons worldview – that value is created by ownership, extraction, and legal enclosure.
From an #openweb and #OMN perspective, that was never the path. The early web (and the cultures that fed into it – FOSS, mailing lists, blogs, wikis) wasn’t held together by copyright enforcement. It was held together by norms: reciprocity, attribution, sharing, trust, and rough social accountability. That’s much closer to the #4opens than to IP law. Open code, open standards, open data, open process – not because the law enforced fairness, but because social relations did.
What #AI scraping has broken is not a legal equilibrium, but a fragile social one that the #dotcons had already been hollowing out for decades. They didn’t rely on “fair use” or reciprocity – they relied on enclosure, centralisation, and extraction, #AI simply accelerates that logic. So yes, “anything reachable by HTTP becomes fuel” is accurate – but the mistake is thinking the alternative is stronger copyright walls or more contractual gating, that deepens enclosure. The split you describe is real, but it’s not new, and it’s not caused by #AI, it’s the endpoint of a long enclosure of commons → platform capture (#dotcons), trust → contracts, sharing → surveillance + monetisation and public space → login walls.
The current AI mess is not the origin of this, it’s just a new layer of extraction sitting on top of the #mainstreaming mess. From an #OMN view, the interesting question isn’t how to reassert IP over scraping. It’s how to rebuild social and technical spaces where contribution, context, and reciprocity matter again – where value isn’t just extracted but circulated in ways communities can govern.
AI is not an existential threat to the #openweb, it’s an asshole amplifier inside an already broken system. The real loss we need to compost isn’t only copyright protection, it’s the erosion of the social commons that made openness meaningful in the first place.
The European Commission has published its new Tech Sovereignty Plan. On the surface this sounds promising. Europe talks about reducing dependence on foreign tech giants, strengthening digital autonomy, and supporting open source. These are all things many of us in the #openweb world have been arguing for decades.
But when you look at where the money and attention actually go, a different picture emerges. The plan allocates vast resources to semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, AI, and data centres. Open source gets a much smaller slice of the pie, and native #openweb like the #Fediverse barely registers at all. The one mention is support for decentralised social media, highlighted through the Commission’s continued use of Mastodon. (Digital Strategy)
The problem is that this isn’t new, as the European Commission has already been running a Mastodon server for years. Extending account creation to more EU institutions is not a strategic breakthrough, it is clicking a button that could have been clicked years ago. If this is the flagship example of support for social communication sovereignty, then the ambition is criminally limited.
The issue is that the Commission still does not understand that social infrastructure is infrastructure. We hear endless noise about sovereign AI, sovereign cloud, sovereign chips, and sovereign data centres. Yet the FOSS code and communities through which citizens actually communicate, organise, publish, collaborate, and build are treated as an afterthought.
The result is a contradiction – Europe recognises that depending on foreign cloud providers is a strategic weakness. It recognises that depending on foreign AI companies is a strategic weakness. It recognises that depending on foreign semiconductor supply chains is a strategic weakness. Yet dependence on a handful of US-owned social platforms for public discourse apparently remains acceptable. Who needs sovereignty over communication anyway?
The #openweb blind spot is the normal long-running #geekproblem in institutional form. Policymakers see infrastructure as technical systems. Servers, processors, storage, networks. But the real value of the internet was never the hardware, it was always the social layer built on top. The #openweb succeeded because it created shared public spaces based on open standards. Email. RSS. Blogs. Forums. Early independent media. Later, federated systems like ActivityPub.
The Commission’s sovereignty agenda focuses on plumbing while ignoring the public spaces that the plumbing exists to support. Without investment in #4opens social protocols, community governance, and public communication infrastructure, Europe is building sovereign pipes that still carry people back into the same #dotcons corporate platforms.
Open source without communities is the unspoken problem. The Commission talks about open source as a strategic asset for European competitiveness and sovereignty. That’s welcome as far as it goes. But open source is not simply a collection of code repositories, it survives because communities maintain it. The danger is that Europe treats open source as a procurement strategy rather than a social ecosystem. Buy some software, fund a few projects, write a strategy document, then assume the problem is solved.
Real digital sovereignty requires long-term investment in communities of use, admins, mods, maintainers, governance, interoperability, and public institutions that can steward shared infrastructure over decades. Even many open-source advocates point out that procurement rules, short-term funding cycles, and “open-source washing” continue to undermine the ecosystem. (FSFE – Free Software Foundation Europe). You cannot buy sovereignty off the shelf.
From an #OMN perspective, the weakness in the Tech Sovereignty Plan is that it remains trapped inside an industrial understanding of technology. Technology is not just hardware, technology is not just software, technology is social relations embodied in tools. If Europe wants genuine digital sovereignty, it needs to invest in:
Open social protocols.
Federated communication infrastructure.
Community-owned media.
Public digital commons.
Open governance.
Long-term stewardship of shared resources.
The social institutions needed to keep these systems alive.
Without this, “tech sovereignty” is another industrial policy aimed at creating European versions of existing #dotcons platforms. That may reduce dependence on Silicon Valley, but it does not necessarily increase freedom.
Beyond “sovereignty” is the deeper question – not whether Europe controls its technology stack. The deeper question is whether citizens control the systems that shape their lives. The Commission is slowly beginning to recognise the importance of open source. That’s a positive step. But as things stand, social communication sovereignty remains a tiny footnote in a strategy dominated by chips, cloud, AI, and data centres.
For the #openweb, that is the wrong way round, the future of “digital sovereignty” is not simply owning the infrastructure, it is owning the public spaces built on top of it.
The problem with the #EU Eurocracy on social and tech issues isn’t usually only malice, it’s institutional incompetence. They struggle to understand grassroots digital culture, the #openweb, commons-based governance, and the social realities of how technology actually works.
That leaves us with a choice. We can try to engage, push, educate, and help them become a little less incompetent. Or we can focus entirely on tearing down existing institutions.
The danger with the second path is obvious. Vacuums rarely stay empty. If progressive and grassroots voices walk away, the people most ready to fill the space are the nationalist, authoritarian, and right-wing forces already waiting in the wings.
This isn’t just an #EU issue. It applies to most #mainstreaming institutions. They are often failing, slow-moving, and trapped in outdated assumptions. But abandoning them entirely doesn’t automatically lead somewhere better.
The challenge is to build alternatives like #OMN and the #openweb while also applying enough pressure, education, and challenge to stop existing institutions from becoming even worse.
Not a comfortable path, but likely the least dangerous one.
For most people, the crisis feels recent. Housing costs. Energy bills. Food prices. Debt. Insecure work. Growing inequality. Endless wars. Ecological breakdown. The #mainstreaming story is that these are separate problems with separate causes. COVID. Ukraine. China. Immigration. Technology. Bad politicians. The reality is simpler, these crises grow from the same roots – the moment things changed, one graph tells the story.
From the end of World War II until roughly the early 1970s, productivity and wages rose together. When workers produced more value, they received a larger share of that value. This was not charity. It was the social settlement that emerged from the disasters of the Great Depression and World War II. Governments understood that if ordinary people could not afford the goods they produced, capitalism would repeatedly collapse into crisis. The answer was public investment, strong unions, social housing, public infrastructure, public healthcare, education, and rising wages.
This was what some people now call the “golden age” of capitalism. Workers bought homes. Families survived on a single income. Public infrastructure expanded. Living standards generally improved. Then the trend broke, as productivity continued rising, but wages stopped. For the last fifty years, workers have produced more and more while receiving proportionally less and less. The wealth didn’t disappear, it moved upward.
Saving capitalism from itself – The original US New Deal wasn’t created because elitists became generous, it emerged because the system faced a legitimacy crisis. Mass unemployment. Mass poverty. Growing labour movements. Strong socialist alternatives. Faced with these pressures, governments invested in public works, strengthened labour rights, regulated finance, and redistributed wealth. The lesson was simple, if people have money, they buy goods, if people buy goods, businesses survive, if businesses survive, the economy functions. This wasn’t radical, it was practical as the state acted to stabilise society.
The neoliberal turn – by the 1970s, a different ideology was waiting in the wings. The solution offered by thinkers such as Milton Friedman and institutions such as the Chicago School was to reverse the post-war settlement. Privatise public assets, break unions, cut taxes on wealth, deregulate finance and reduce social spending to treat everything as a market. This project became government policy under Reagan, Thatcher, and much of the Western political class. The promise was freedom, the result was enclosure. Public wealth became private wealth, collective institutions were weakened, corporate power expanded, the bargaining power of workers collapsed.
The result was clear, the graph above tells the story, productivity kept climbing, compensation stagnated. The gains increasingly flowed upward. For the workers debt replaced wages, the old social contract was based on rising incomes, the new one was based on borrowing. If wages no longer rise fast enough, people still need homes, education, healthcare, transport. The gap was filled with debt: Credit cards, Student loans, Mortgages, Personal loans. Instead of sharing productivity gains directly, people borrowed against their futures. This worked for a while, until it didn’t.
A resent example of this mess is 2008 – The financial crash – exposed the reality, when ordinary people face crisis, they are told to tighten their belts. When financial institutions face crisis, public money appears instantly. Millions lost homes, lost jobs. Meanwhile, banks received vast bailouts. The lesson was clear. The system still knew how to mobilise resources, it simply chose who to save.
This is why we use the harsh hashtag #Deathcult. Composting this mess is where the #OMN idea of the #deathcult becomes useful as neoliberalism is not simply a set of economic policies, it is a cultural common sense. It teaches a “common sense” path that markets solve everything and that public solutions are inefficient. That society does not exist, that individuals succeed or fail alone. That endless growth on a finite planet is normal. That every commons must become a commodity.
This invisible ideology is now so deeply embedded that many people cannot imagine alternatives. The system creates crises and then presents more market solutions as the answer. Climate collapse becomes carbon trading. Housing crisis becomes investment opportunity. Community becomes #dotcons platforms. Citizens become consumers. The cure is always more of the disease.
In this mess we need to remember what we have lost, the biggest loss wasn’t economic, it was social. The institutions that once balanced private power were weakened: Trade unions, Cooperatives, Mutual aid, Community media, Public ownership, Local democracy, Shared stewardship, The commons. These weren’t perfect, but they gave ordinary people collective power. Without them, people are pushed into isolated competition. What #OMN calls #stupidindividualism. Everyone struggling alone against systems too large to influence individually.
Building beyond the mess, is not about post-modern nostalgia, the post-war settlement was deeply flawed. But what is built can be rebuilt, this means on a progressive path creating commons rather than commodities, governance rather than management, participation rather than consumption and community media rather than corporate platforms to grow cooperation rather than extraction.
As social infrastructure, the #4opens provide one practical foundation for this work: open process, open data, open standards and open licences. Because the real challenge is not technological. It is rebuilding the social relationships that make alternatives possible.
To sum up the graph of productivity and wages is not simply an economic chart, it is a map showing where the wealth went. And once we know where it went, we can start asking a more useful question: #KISS how do we build something different?
Let’s be clear about something, the commons are not an academic concept waiting to be discovered by economists or policy wonks, not a diagram in a textbook, not something that needs a queen, a government, or a management consultant to bring into existence. The commons are what people have always done when they are left alone to organise their own survival with neighbours they trust.
Peasants managing grazing land across medieval Europe. Indigenous communities stewarding water, forest and fishery for generations. Canal boat communities building informal mutual aid along waterways. Squatters running collective houses. Hackers building free software together. #Indymedia collectives publishing grassroots news from the bottom up. The digital commons – open source, creative commons, the #fediverse, the #openweb – already existing right now, built by thousands of ordinary people, not by any institution.
This is worth saying clearly because the #mainstreaming story about the commons almost always starts in the wrong place – with Garrett Hardin’s 1968 “tragedy of the commons” paper, which blamed collective ownership for environmental destruction and was used for decades to justify privatisation. The paper was ideologically loaded, historically illiterate, and largely wrong.
On the other side of mainstreaming we have Elinor Ostrom who spent her privileged career documenting why, eventually winning a Nobel Prize for showing that communities routinely manage commons successfully under the right social conditions. Her work, it is full of peasants, fishers, farmers and irrigators, not governments or corporations, let’s try and balance pointing at the top by point to the source
The real tragedy is not the commons. It is what #neoliberalism does to the social fabric that makes commons possible. As I have been arguing for years at hamishcampbell.com, the #deathcult worship of the 1980s and 1990s didn’t just privatise assets – it broke the institutions and the relationships that made collective stewardship possible. Hyper-individualism doesn’t just make people selfish, it makes cooperation feel unnatural, even threatening. That is not an accident, it is a classic divide-and-control strategy.
The path back is not top-down – it never was – it is horizontal, rooted in trust, built through repeated small acts of mutual accountability. It is turning stress and conflict into commons culture rather than mutual destruction. It is rebuilding journalism as a commons rather than a product. It is composting “digital sovereignty” branding and just actually building working commons tech instead. The #4opens – open process, open data, open standards, open licences – are not abstract technical principles, they are social trust infrastructure, the modern grounding the commons grows from.
Thatcher said there is no such thing as society – the commons, everywhere it has ever worked, is the practical, lived refutation of that claim. Not a government programme, not a think tank report. Peasants. Boaters. Coders. Neighbours. People organising their own lives together, horizontally, with accountability to each other.
That is where we start, that is where we always started.
This story is about the ideology that won. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two politicians on either side of the Atlantic didn’t only win elections, they reshaped what people came to accept as “common sense.” Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States did not invent capitalism’s worst tendencies, but they gave them state power, institutional infrastructure, and ideological legitimacy.
What they built was not simply a set of policies, it was a social programme we are still trapped inside more than forty years later. The push was simple and devastating citizens became “taxpayers,” public services became “handouts,” collective investment became “inefficiency,” and the commons became a problem to be solved through privatisation.
Decades of postwar social infrastructure – built on the understanding that some things are too important to be left to markets – were dismantled, defunded, and handed over to private interests -the very same interests funding the political projects carrying out the dismantling.
This is what #OMN means when we talk about enclosure. Not just land enclosure, but the enclosure of everyday life itself: Water, housing, transport, education, healthcare, communication and culture. Everything turned into a commodity.
Neither Thatcher nor Reagan created this mess, the project was carefully engineered. Reagan established a President’s Commission on Privatisation which drew up extensive plans to strip public assets and services. Thatcher pushed through mass privatisation of utilities, council housing, and national industries while selling the process as “popular capitalism.”
Behind them stood an entire ideological machine of the Heritage Foundation, the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Reason Foundation, and countless university economics departments and corporate-funded policy groups.
Their role was to make radical upward redistribution sound like neutral common sense, and they succeeded. Even the language changed “tax burden,” “efficiency,” “choice,” “reform,” “flexibility.” Every word quietly carrying the ideology.
The method itself was brutally simple – cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations. Create public deficits. Use those deficits to declare public services “unaffordable.” Privatise the resulting wreckage. Transfer wealth upward. Starve public institutions until they fail, then point at the failure as proof they never worked.
The cruelty was not accidental, it was structural. Thatcher’s Chancellor openly described mass unemployment as “a price worth paying.” Reagan’s administration treated social devastation as collateral damage in the restoration of elitist power.
The results were not abstract, from 1948 to roughly 1979 in the United States, productivity and worker wages rose together. After Reagan, productivity continued climbing sharply while wages largely stagnated. Workers produced more wealth than ever before, but a growing share of that wealth flowed upward into capital accumulation rather than wages or public goods.
The mess this created was Labour’s share of national income steadily declined while housing costs rose, debt exploded, unions collapsed, and public infrastructure deteriorated. Debt became the mechanism keeping society functioning: mortgages, credit cards, car loans, student loans, payday lending. Daily survival increasingly depended on borrowing. Higher education shifted from a public good into a privatised commodity. Healthcare became financial extraction. Housing became speculation rather than shelter.
The language was “freedom.” But the freedom being expanded was the freedom of capital. None of this was racially neutral. Reagan’s “welfare queen” narrative deliberately racialised poverty to fracture working-class solidarity. The actual fraud case behind the story was tiny compared to the propaganda built around it, but the myth worked politically because it redirected anger downward rather than upward.
The so-called “War on Drugs” targeted Black communities while harsher sentencing laws entrenched mass incarceration. Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic was ignored for years because many of the people dying were treated as disposable by political elites. Thatcher’s government supported sanctions-busting trade with apartheid South Africa while denouncing the ANC and treating Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.
These were not side issues, the neoliberalism story required enemies: welfare scroungers, criminals, radicals, immigrants, trade unionists, the “undeserving poor.” Every enclosure needs someone to blame for the damage enclosure causes.
In the rich west the programme attacked wages, unions, and public services. Abroad it was openly violent. Reagan’s administration funded and armed the Contras in Nicaragua despite international condemnation. US-backed regimes across Latin America carried out massacres, disappearances, and systematic repression while being framed as defenders of “freedom.” Thatcher supported Augusto Pinochet long after the scale of torture and repression was well known.
The noise was consistent and on going as liberation movements became “terrorists,” dictators aligned with Western capital became “allies,” and democracy mattered only when it protected existing power. The same logic still dominates global politics today.
What was lost was not only economic, the postwar social settlement – however flawed – rested on the idea that some things belonged to everyone and should be collectively protected:
healthcare,
housing,
education,
water,
transport,
welfare,
culture,
democratic infrastructure.
These systems were not gifts from benevolent elitists, they were won through the struggle by labour movements, cooperatives, mutual aid traditions, socialist organising, and community solidarity. Thatcher famously claimed:
“There is no such thing as society.”
This was not only rhetoric, it was a political programme. Destroy people’s belief in collective action and you destroy their ability to resist enclosure. This is where the #OMN critique of the “tragedy of the commons” matters. People are capable of managing commons collectively, history is full of successful examples, what neoliberalism destroys are the social conditions that make commons possible:
trust,
reciprocity,
accountability,
long-term stewardship,
community responsibility.
When competition replaces care, extraction replaces stewardship, hyper-individualism – what we call #stupidindividualism – erodes social fabric itself. The tragedy becomes real because the conditions needed to avoid it are systematically dismantled.
Understanding this matters not for nostalgia, but for navigation. The crises surrounding us now: housing collapse, ecological breakdown, inequality, democratic decay, loneliness, food insecurity, social fragmentation, mental health crises, are not random failures. They are predictable outcomes of forty years of #neoliberal wrecking. The mess this created is functioning largely as designed, prioritises elitist capital accumulation above any social wellbeing.
The liberal centre cannot solve this because it operates inside the same logic, technocratic management of decline is not transformation. Real alternatives require rebuilding #KISS commons-based infrastructure, not only as abstract ideals, but as practical trust infrastructure. This is the work of composting the current mess and growing alternatives from within the ruins.
Thatcher claimed there was no alternative, she was wrong. But building alternatives means being honest about what was destroyed, who destroyed it, how they destroyed it, and why the same logic still dominates today. This honesty is where rebuilding begins.
With this in mind, let’s recap on what Thatcher and Reagan built, its not just bad policy, not just inequality, its a full #deathcult – the self-destructive logic of #neoliberalism so committed to short-term greed and #stupidindividualism that it knowingly sacrifices the ecological and social foundations human life depends on. Forty years of hard indoctrination that doesn’t just fade away its – normal is walking around in a toxic story and calling it common sense.
The #nastyfew – platform owners, landlords, corporate lobbies, think tank networks – didn’t win through merit. They won the #classwar temporarily, by capturing institutions, rewriting rules, and flooding the #mainstreaming with their logic until it felt like gravity.
The #dotcons – Facebook, Google, X/Twitter and the rest – are the digital continuation of the same enclosure. Corporate platforms built on data extraction, presenting themselves as neutral public spaces while converting human attention and community into profit. The #closedweb is just privatisation with a friendlier interface.
And the #climatechaos bearing down on us is not a separate crisis. It is the #deathcult arriving at its logical destination.
Real alternatives are built from the bottom, not handed down from the top. The #openweb – internet infrastructure built on open standards, community control, and the #4opens (open code, open data, open standards, open process) – already exists as working infrastructure, built by thousands of ordinary people, not governments or corporations. Then we have the #fediverse, #activitypub, #FOSS, #indymedia – these are not utopian visions, already built, from the ground up, by people practising #DIY politics for real.
The #geekproblem is when this gets captured – when technical control replaces social trust, when complexity becomes a barrier rather than a tool, when #techchurn burns through community energy without building anything lasting. The antidote is #KISS – keeping it simple, human, and rooted in real relationships.
The #NGO path – professionalised, funder-friendly, managed dissent – is #mainstreaming with a radical badge on, it defuses rather than builds. The #fashernista tendency prioritising the look and language of activism over the unglamorous work of building lasting structure is #fluffy blocking in performance clothing.
What actually works is #grassroots organising grounded in trust, horizontal process, and the willingness to #compost failure breaking down what didn’t work into fuel for what comes next rather than hiding the mess or repeating it. As the #OMN path puts it: broken institutions need rebuilding as commons, not as managed services or branded campaigns.
The #deathcult is real, the mess is real, the #nothingnew reminder is useful – these cycles have happened before, and ignoring that history is how we walk straight into the same traps again. But so is the ground we already stand on, sart there.
The story is simple once you stop looking at the green branding and start looking at social power. A powerless tenant farmer in the Cairngorms watches land his family has worked for generations sell for ten times what it was worth only a few years ago. Not because farming suddenly became more valuable, but because carbon became a speculative asset. A corporation somewhere needs a green badge, farm land becomes the badge, our agriculture disappearing becomes the cost. This is not a “mistake”, its normal, this is the “common sense” system working as designed. #ClimateChaos under capitalism becomes another market opportunity, another asset class, another enclosure of the commons.
The mechanism of the #Carboncon, a corporation that has power can carry on almost exactly as before climate change became an issue: same factories, same flights, same extraction, same emissions, same growth ideology. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants trees on it, and announces to the world that it is now “carbon neutral.” If it wants more PR sparkle, it calls itself “carbon negative.” Nothing fundamental changes. The emissions are still happening, extraction is still happening, the destruction is still happening.
What changes is the accounting story, a piece of land somewhere else is converted into a tradable abstraction that launders the corporation’s image while allowing business-as-usual to continue. This is the logic of #neoliberalism applied to ecology – if there is a crisis, turn the crisis into a market. Our glaring current example of this is BrewDog and its greenwashing cycle, #BrewDog becomes a perfect illustration of the mess, in 2020 the company bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, partly funded through public grants, promising millions of trees and “carbon negative” operations.
Then reality hit a large number of trees died, peat disturbance has released stored carbon, regulators ruled the carbon-negative advertising misleading, the branding quietly disappeared, and the estate was later sold into the carbon-offset market. Public money in, #PR campaign launched, trees dead, farmer displaced, badge worn, land commodified and Carbon credits traded – Business continues as normal, round and round the #deathcult spins.
This should sound historically familiar: The Highland Clearances never really ended, the justification changed. Then it was sheep, now it is carbon. Communities are again being displaced by distant capital as land is consolidated into investment portfolios instead of living local economies. The mess is productive mixed-use landscapes are transformed into speculative ecological assets managed for investors, corporations, and global finance.
This is enclosure updated for the era of #climatechaos. Around half of Scottish estate sales in recent years have gone to investment funds, corporations, and large trusts rather than people intending to actually live on and work the land. At the same time local communities are priced out, young farmers are locked out, food production declines, rural life becomes hollowed out, and decision-making moves further away from the people directly affected.
The language changes, the extraction remains the same, the deeper problem is that people still expect the systems causing the crisis to somehow solve the crisis. But capitalism does not solve crises, it monetises them – when pollution becomes profitable, pollution markets appear, when climate collapses, carbon markets appear, when social breakdown accelerates, surveillance markets appear, when loneliness spreads, platform monopolies appear. The system feeds on crisis because crisis creates new opportunities for extraction #KISS.
This is why the #mainstreaming obsession with “green growth” is ideological theatre, infinite growth on a finite planet was always insane, adding green branding does not make it sane in any way. The carbon market does not reduce emissions, it redistributes responsibility while preserving existing power structures. The food grown by local farmers is real, the communities rooted in landscapes are real, the accumulated ecological knowledge is real. The carbon spreadsheet is an abstraction traded by financial actors who have little or no connection to the land itself.
This is where projects like #OMN matter, its path is about rebuilding the social infrastructure needed for collective action outside the control of #dotcons, PR agencies, NGOs, and corporate gatekeepers. Because right now, the stories people hear are shaped by institutions whose survival depends on preserving the existing system. The corporation has a marketing department, the local people usually does not, so the lies travel faster than the truth.
The #openweb matters because communities need their own media infrastructure to organise, communicate, document to resist enclosure in all its modern forms. Without this, even resistance becomes mediated through controlling paths designed to neutralise it. A society built on commodification will commodify nature, society built on extraction will extract from ecological collapse itself, society built on #stupidindividualism will struggle to defend commons and collective life in any meaningful way. This is why we need to become the change and challenge, not through current common sense purity politics, not through #fashionista performative consumerism, and definitely not through corporate-approved and funded activism.
But through rebuilding #OMN commons-based culture and infrastructure from the ground up, by compost not branding – our tools are shovels, not greenwashed investment portfolios. The future depends on whether we keep feeding the #deathcult or start growing alternatives.
The #KISS secret about the noise in “digital sovereignty” is very simple – Ignore most of this branding and build commons tech instead. That’s the path, not another layer of management, another funding bureaucracy for a glossy strategy document. Not another NGO conference circuit explaining why nothing can happen without another round of funding. Just build working commons.
This matters because much of the #EU “digital sovereignty” conversation is simply more churn inside the same #neoliberal#mainstreaming logic that created the problem in the first place. Europe spent decades outsourcing infrastructure, privatising public space, undermining local autonomy, and feeding the #dotcons.
Now the consequences are becoming impossible to ignore, dependence on US platform monopolies, fragile infrastructure, imperialist surveillance capitalism, cloud centralisation, shrinking democratic accountability, and growing geopolitical vulnerability.
So suddenly everybody is talking about “sovereignty”, but what do our chattering class of institutional actors mean by sovereignty? Too often they mean procurement contracts, compliance frameworks, consultancy ecosystems, defence posturing, startup hype and fashionable funding narratives. The same old structures wearing a new outfit.
This is where the #fashionistas rush in to cash out of the latest cycle of #techshit, every crisis produces a new branding wave #Web3, #AI, #blockchain, smart cities, trusted identity and now digital sovereignty. The words change, the consultants were the same clothes, to push funding applications with different buzz words. But underneath, the social relations to often stay exactly the same. This is why so much “innovation” produces so little durable social value, the energy and focus gets consumed by branding, positioning, institutional competition, and funding capture.
The #OMN approach is to compost this mess rather than feed it. Composting means recognising that some parts of the existing system still contain nutrients technical knowledge, infrastructure, institutions, legal frameworks, public funding, developer skills. But these need breaking down and re-rooting into commons processes instead of simply reproducing the same dead structures.
The #KISS approach is important because complexity is often used as a control system, the more complicated the governance path becomes the harder it is for normal people to participate, the easier it is for insiders to dominate, and the more power flows to the parasite class managing the process. People then confuse institutional complexity with competence, but most healthy social systems are not built this way, healthy systems tend to be transparent, iterative, federated, participatory, and grounded in practical trust.
That’s why the native #openweb worked when it worked, people built things together directly like mailing lists, forums, blogs (bit more messy), federated publishing, open protocols, community hosting, shared standards. Messy? Yes. Human? Yes, but functional. The current “digital sovereignty” debate ignores this history because acknowledging it would undermine the need for the giant managerial layer now feeding on the crisis.
A lot of the current policy noise is about preserving institutional power during systemic decline, that’s why signal-to-noise matters, most of the noise performs concern, manages perception, protects careers, and absorbs dissent into harmless process. Signal is rarer, it’s about building actual commons’ infrastructure, creating durable trust networks, supporting federation, sharing governance openly, and keeping paths simple enough that communities can understand and maintain them.
This is one reason the #4opens remain central, without these, “digital sovereignty” simply becomes another enclosure strategy under a different flag. European-owned silos are still silos, state-managed platform capitalism is still platform capitalism. Replacing Silicon Valley landlords with Brussels landlords is not liberation.
The real challenge is rebuilding public digital commons, that means the hard part is cultural, not only technical. People are deeply trained by #mainstreaming to look upward for solutions to governments, corporations, experts, influencers, NGO etc. But commons culture grows sideways instead, through participation, trust and through practical collaboration, yes this is slower at first, but far more resilient over time.
That’s the real #KISS secret, ignore much of the spectacle and quietly build the alternative underneath it. Less noise, more compost – Less branding, more commons – Less #techshit. More grounded infrastructure. That’s how you compost the #mainstreaming mess instead of endlessly feeding it.
“Being in #Oxford today, I popped into the #OxfordUnion to use a room. Glancing through the term card, it’s absolutely vile – and has been consistently so for the two years I’ve been back in the city. It’s a useful, if deeply dispiriting, exercise in reading the people and place. This is where parts of the next ruling class form their opinions and sharpen their instincts. Judging by what they’re platforming, we are not heading for a good time…”
One useful term about this mess on the #OMN path is “Sophist”. Historically, the Sophists were traveling teachers in Ancient Greece during the 5th and 4th centuries BC. They taught rhetoric, politics, philosophy, and persuasion to the sons of the ruling elite. In many ways, they were the media consultants, communication strategists, and public intellectuals of their time. Their ideas were, and still are, deeply useful to elitist power. Truth was treated not as something to strive for, but as something relative to perspective and circumstance. Protagoras summed this up with the phrase “Man is the measure of all things.”
From this flowed a power-based philosophy – if truth is flexible, then gaining and holding power is less about discovering what is true, and more about learning how to persuade people effectively. Sophists became famous for teaching students how to win arguments regardless of the facts, make “the weaker argument appear stronger,” and manipulate rhetoric and perception for advantage.
This is why philosophers like Socrates and Plato attacked them so fiercely. Classical philosophy, much like the modern scientific ideal, was supposed to be a search for truth, ethics, wisdom, and understanding. The Sophists instead treated philosophy as a competitive social tool for gaining status, influence, and power.
That conflict has never gone away, when we look at the last 40 years, it becomes obvious that we now live inside a revived Sophist culture. Under neoliberal #mainstreaming, politics, media, academia, branding, and online culture have steadily shifted away from questions of shared reality and toward competitive narrative management.
The central questions are no longer what is true? what is just? and what works for the commons? Instead, the “common sense” questions become what performs well? What wins attention? What controls the narrative? What protects the brand? What keeps the funding flowing? And finally, the #stupidindividualism of, what keeps the career safe?
This is the culture the #dotcons perfected, were algorithms reward emotional reaction over understanding, public relations replaces public reasoning, identity replaces grounded collective politics so that communication becomes performance instead of dialogue. Truth becomes aesthetic.
That is in part why so many people now experience a constant feeling of unreality, we are swimming in rhetorical systems optimized not for understanding, but for engagement, manipulation, and market positioning. The modern “post-truth” condition is not accidental, it is the logical outcome of self-interested #postmodern Sophist culture merged with #dotcons platform capitalism feedback loops.
What do we have to balance this, the #OMN path matters because it tries to push against this drift. The goal is not some fantasy of perfect objectivity, humans are always partial, messy, emotional, and socially situated. But there is still a huge difference between collectively searching for grounded truth together, and treating all communication as strategic manipulation. The first builds commons – the second destroys trust. This is why the #4opens matter:
Open process, Open data, Open standards, Open licences.
These are not only technical principles, they are social tools designed to reduce hidden manipulation and rebuild shared trust. Visible process matters because invisible power breeds Sophistry. Open discussion matters because branding culture hides contradictions behind managed messaging. Shared media matters because without public memory, every conversation resets into manipulation and spin.
The danger of endless rhetoric is that a society trapped in Sophist culture loses the ability to act collectively. Everything becomes performance, positioning, optics, career management, and endless dead-end symbolic conflict. Meanwhile the real flowing crises deepen, #climatechaos, enclosure, collapsing infrastructure, rising authoritarianism and the destruction of public life. People are trained to argue endlessly while losing the ability to build together.
This is one of the many reasons the #openweb matters, yes, native #openweb culture is imperfect, messy, and chaotic, but it is also rooted in a stronger relationship between communication and shared reality. People built infrastructure together, they argued, but they also created commons, this spirit still survives in fragments across the #Fediverse path.
We need to use these tools to compost the Sophist mess – not through purity politics or ideological certainty, because that simply creates another closed rhetorical system. The path is to reboot cultures where truth matters again, evidence matters, lived experience matters, dialogue matters, and collective accountability matters. This needs focus because the current system trains exactly the opposite habits.
The #OMN path tries to compost this mess instead of reproducing it – with less rhetorical theater and more grounded process, less manipulation, more trust, less “winning the argument,” more building shared understanding strong enough to support collective action. That is the underlying conflict beneath much of today’s social and political confusion – the struggle between communication as manipulation and communication as commons.
And right now, the commons desperately need rebuilding, and this matters for both the #openweb reboot and the #OxfordBoaters struggle. Both are fundamentally fights over who controls reality, narrative, legitimacy, and public memory. The landowners’ push in Oxford is a small-scale example of modern Sophistry in action. The issue is not simply “facts” about moorings, river access, safety, or management. The battle is over framing of who gets presented as “reasonable,” who gets framed as “problematic,” whose voices count, whose history becomes visible and who’s gets erased. This is how eliteist power works – not only through visible force, but through narrative management, institutional framing, bureaucratic process, selective legitimacy, and most importently control of communication channels.
The boaters to often fail to engage with this power because of the atomized #stupidindividualism that dominates our lives. Yet they are precisely the people with lived experience, practical knowledge, and deep historical connection to the river, metaphor and real.
Instead, the conflict becomes nastier than it needs to be because it shifts away from solving shared problems and toward managing perception. That is modern Sophistry in practice, the same thing happens across the wider internet. The early #openweb was messy, but it was rooted in participation, shared infrastructure, transparency, and collective building. People made websites, forums, federated systems, community media, and open tools together. There were arguments, conflicts, and failures, but there was also visible process and public memory.
The rise of the #dotcons replaced much of this with managed perception systems optimised for engagement, advertising, behavioural manipulation, and social control. Communication shifted from dialogue to performance, from publishing to branding, from communities to audiences, from commons to platforms and from participation to passive consumption. Again, this is Sophistry – communication not for understanding, but for influence and control.
This is why the #OMN path matters. The project is not simply about “better media” or “better activism.” It is about rebuilding the social conditions where grounded collective understanding becomes possible again. For the #openweb reboot this means rebuilding commons infrastructure, restoring public conversation, protecting shared memory, creating transparent governance to resist platform manipulation.
For the #OxfordBoaters struggle this means creating our own media stories to document lived reality, preserving collective memory, make hidden processes visible. This is why the #4opens are practical anti-Sophist tools – Open process counters hidden manipulation – Open data counters selective framing – Open standards counter enclosure – Open licences protect shared social knowledge from privatisation. Without these, power disappears into invisible structures while presenting itself as neutral management.
One of the deepest problems today is that many people now trust polished institutional narratives and #dotcons tools more than messy lived experience. Boaters should already understand this because they directly experience the gap between official language and material reality. The boat struggle and the #openweb struggle are connected because both are about defending commons against enclosure: river commons, communication commons, social commons and democratic commons. And both are being undermined by the same Sophist culture of managed perception, institutional branding, bureaucratic abstraction, and invisible power.
So the task is not simply to “win arguments.” That is the Sophistry trap. The native path we need is rebuild is gthe environments where truth emerge collectively, trust grows, so conflict can become productive instead of performative, and people can act together in the real world.
In short, the fight is not just against bad policies or bad platforms. It is between communication as manipulation and communication as commons. And if we do not consciously rebuild the commons side of that divide, both the rivers and the web will continue disappearing into managed enclosure #KISS
You know, when people are heading over a cliff, I’m more than happy to be “left behind“.
This story is #openwashing, not innovation. “New European social network” is actually a fork of #Bluesky wrapped in sovereignty language, as Elena Rossini says with the same #dotcons logic – PR-first launch (Davos), reality comes later (or never). This tech mess illustrates, if people start with branding, funding, and media narrative instead of community and process, it’s not #openweb – it’s #closedweb in a mask, when people ignore existing commons is easy to see the red flag.
Why is this a mess? Existing working systems: #Fediverse (e.g. Mastodon), RSS, open standards, were ignored or dismissed as “non-scalable” or “non-monetizable” so there plan is reinventing the wheel → badly. With “scaling” used as an excuse for control with claims that the #fediverse “can’t scale” and “needs monetization”. The simple reality is scaling here is an old story of centralising control + extracting value.
Let’s look at this from a native view of grassroots scale = trust, diversity, human limits vs corporate scale vs control, extraction, surveillance. They are different processes → different outcomes with ID verification = anti-commons architecture. What this creates is exclusion, surveillance, and power asymmetry. This shallowly hidden #dotcons path flips the #openweb model from permissionless participation to controlled access and tracking. It’s not a public space – it’s “smiling” infrastructure for governance and policing.
Let’s look at how the media failed as it’s a part of the problem, journalists repeated press releases with no technical or cultural literacy, leading to the #mainstreaming mythology of “first European network” unchallenged, this cultural memory hole is a recurring mess we need to compost. The outcome is every shallow reboot looks “new”.
This feeds the real divide in tech vs culture. You see the same split again on the dev side: forks protocols, builds platforms → ignores social process. And on the activist side: understands community → stuck in Facebook/Slack. Without combining both you either get silos or you get capture. One useful way of seeing this is to follow the money, to see the outcome of investor-driven, marketing-heavy teams with “Monetization” as a core requirement. Funding-first projects don’t build commons, they build exits, leverage and control systems.
It should be obviously – nobody should be surprised that this liberal pushing of “Sovereignty” is being hijacked, using #EU branding as legitimacy. This is the #eurowashing of #dotcons models we touched on at the start. Real “sovereignty”, what ever it means, lives in open protocols, distributed governance and local autonomy. Not in a branded platform, or the nation state any more – thus the danger is confusion. People will still join because “it’s European”, “it’s new” and “it sounds ethical”. Thus, the problem isn’t only evil actors – it’s signal-to-noise collapse.
What this means for projects like the #OMN (the actionable bit). This whole story reinforces the core path – that we focus on stopping building “new platforms” to start composting what already exists. A common’s strategy using existing protocols (#ActivityPub, RSS), rooted in grassroots trust networks. Keep processes open (#4opens) to accept human-scale limits then scale by federate for reach, not control.
The #WSocial mess shows exactly what happens when you strip the #openweb of its culture and replace it with PR, funding, and control. Our native path is the opposite, growth from the commons. Its #KISS or you just recreate the problem.
Signal, Noise, and the missing ground – We have a signal-to-noise problem, that if we’re serious about “paths to growth,” we need to be honest about the paths and people pushing us down paths we’re actually walking. The problem was never just the #dotcons platforms. It’s what we build instead – and more importantly, how and why we build it.
Right now, too much of the #openweb conversation is caught in narrative loops of reframing stagnation as growth, critique as progress and visibility as impact. That’s the “paths to growth” trap. The #fashionista movement where activity is presented as meaningful change, without asking what is materially shifting underneath. From an #NGO perspective, this should ring alarm bells – outputs are being mistaken for outcomes. This is where the signal keeps geting lost.
We don’t lack ideas, frameworks, or commentary, we have an abundance of them. What we lack is grounded, collective practice – work rooted in real-world use, trust, and actual need. Instead, we’ve built layer upon layer of people interpreting the #openweb, narrating it, funding it, branding it. Meanwhile, the “soil layer” – people running infrastructure, building communities, and holding things together day-to-day – remains underrepresented, under-resourced, and largely invisible. That’s where the “Open Social” ecosystem is currently quietly breaking down.
The #fashionista problem is friendly gatekeeping is still gatekeeping. This isn’t about bad intentions, it’s about institutional form. Who decides what counts as “important work”? Who gets visibility, funding, and legitimacy? Which version of the #openweb gets promoted? In NGO thinking, this is a question of agenda-setting power, when soft curation becomes quiet exclusion. Over time, this “problem” shapes the field, not only through explicit decisions, but through accumulated bias. The result is a narrowing of what is seen as valid, fundable, and worth paying attention to.
Let’s look at a current example of this mess we need to compost – This Jury is a Symptom. What follows isn’t a critique of individuals as people. It’s a mapping of roles within the ecosystem, and how those roles, collectively, skew the field.
Audrey Tang
“Prosocial digital tools” and civic tech, but operating within state infrastructure. A ministry is still a ministry when legitimacy flows from above. This is the #openweb translated into a form that fits government and #NGO logic: managed participation that stabilises systems rather than challenging them. Valuable in context, but not the same as bottom-up, native practice.
Mike Masnick
“Protocols Not Platforms” was useful framing. But with Bluesky, it became a foundation for the kind of product it critiqued. This is how #mainstreaming works: good ideas are absorbed, reshaped, and redeployed within existing power structures. From an #NGO lens, this is a classic case of co-option.
Laurens Hof
The Fediverse Report is useful journalism. But it’s still reading as observation from the outside. Analysis without embedded practice becomes detached – what looks like insight drifts into repetition. Even by his own admission, there’s fatigue. This is narrative acting as if it were ground truth.
Johannes Ernst
Advising organisations on “navigating decentralised platforms” sits squarely in the mediation layer. This is where translation happens – but also where capture creeps in. Spaces like #FediForum are structured, controlled, and legible to institutions. That makes them low challenge convening spaces, but also reinforcing the dynamics the #openweb is trying to move beyond.
Melanie Bartos
University-led open science communication. This is the institutional layer doing its best to adapt. Mastodon in a university context is a step forward – but the surrounding structures remain top-down. In #NGO terms: adoption of tools without a shift in governance or practice.
Robin Berjon
Operating at the standards and governance layer. Institutions like the W3C shape the infrastructure of the web, but participation is still dominated by well-resourced actors, often including #dotcons. This is reform from within, important, but with structural limits.
PublicSpaces
A coalition of public institutions building non-commercial alternatives. This is closer to the right instinct – moving away from pure market logic. But it remains institution-led. Public funding is valuable input (good compost), but it can still miss the lived reality of grassroots use.
Waag Futurelab
A long-standing critical tech organisation with roots in DIY culture. Over time, it has become embedded in #NGO and funding ecosystems. The work still has value, but the centre of gravity has shifted toward outputs that are legible to funders and partners. This is a familiar trajectory in NGO spaces.
What’s Missing Matters Most
Taken together, this jury represents the narrative, mediation, and funding layers of the #openweb ecosystem. What’s absent is the soil layer – People running Mastodon instances on minimal budgets, community organisers doing trust-based, messy work and practitioners dealing with moderation, governance, and sustainability in real time. In #NGO language: the implementing layer, the frontline, the lived experience.
This absence isn’t neutral as it shapes outcomes. The mess we need to compost is that the “Open Social Awards” will surface work that is legible to institutions, aligned with existing narratives and cleanly packaged and communicable. Meanwhile, the genuinely native work – the messy, relational, unpolished work that actually sustains the ecosystem – remains invisible. Not because anyone intends harm, but because of #blinded institutional common sense – systems reward what they can see, measure, and understand.
Compost, Soil, and Rebalancing
This systemic bias, if we’re serious about the #openweb, need to shift to be more practical:
Less talking about it
More building within it
Less curation from above
More trust from below
For NGOs, this isn’t (only) rejection, it’s a recalibration, a reminder that enabling ecosystems means resourcing soil, not just shaping the story. The key distinction metaphor here is between compost and soil.
A lot of the work described above has real value. It produces compost – ideas, funding, visibility, structure, that’s necessary. But compost only matters if it feeds living systems, if we keep mistaking compost for soil, we end up measuring activity instead of growth. And that’s the meta-mess we need to start composting.
#Identitypolitics, is what happens when liberalism turns inward and fragments – call it mad liberalism. #Culturewar is what happens when that same liberalism hardens and lashes out – bad liberalism. Both look like opposites, but they come from the same place.
The uncomfortable part is both were pushed onto the “left” as the way to fight #neoliberalism the very system that’s been tearing apart the social fabric for decades. Instead of building collective power, we pushed endless identity fragmentation, reactive outrage cycles and symbolic battles detached from material change the left is about.
Energy that could have gone into organising, building, and challenging power structures got redirected into managing discourse and fighting each other. That wasn’t an accident, it was the path of least resistance within a liberal framework that can’t actually confront the roots of the problem, because it’s part of the problem.
So while people were arguing over representation and language, the underlying mess – what we call the #deathcult – carried on concentrating wealth, hollowing out communities and locking in structural inequality. And now, that same system is producing a hard shift to the right, feed by anger without direction, backlash without solutions and reaction filling the vacuum left by the failure of the “left” to build alternatives.
So yes, the liberal centre made the mess, but the more important point is this we’re still stuck inside its framing, still reacting, still fighting on terrain that leads nowhere and still avoiding the work of building something that can actually replace what’s failing. Not to dismiss identity or culture – those matter – but to put them back in proportion, grounded in material reality and collective process. Because if we don’t do that, we stay locked in the loop of liberal fragmentation → right-wing reaction → deeper collapse, and this loop doesn’t end well.
The question isn’t only who to blame, it’s whether we can stop playing the same game long enough to build something else. Let’s look at this from a much wider view.
For a long time, the dominant mainstreaming story has been that today’s instability is blamed on the anger of the “left-behind” in the West, a neat, comfortable narrative. But this is shallow, as long before discontent surfaced in the US or UK, entire societies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union went through something far more extreme.
The 1990s transition to #neoliberalism wasn’t just “reform” – it was a peace-time social collapse when life expectancy dropped, savings were wiped out and crime and addiction surged. This “history” matters now because it shows that what we’re living through isn’t new, it’s the long tail of our worshipping of the same #deathcult, that has been breaking societies for decades.
The illusion of stability from the early 1990s to around 2010, when the world looked unusually stable, even peaceful. Major wars between big powers disappeared, military spending dropped, trade and GDP surged – “Democracy” spread across the globe. This period was framed as success, some even called it the end of history. But this “peace” rested on smoke and mirrors.
#globalisation as control – economic interdependence was supposed to prevent war, the idea was simple if everyone is economically connected, conflict becomes irrational. What actually happened was production was off shored, labour was weakened in the West, global supply chains became fragile and unequal and wealth concentrated at the top. This wasn’t peace, it was #classwar.
The fig leaf of “democracy” was always market compliance, less about collective decision-making and more about maintaining economic growth. In practice governments served markets, institutions constrained popular power and politics became technocratic management. In #OMN terms, this is #mainstreaming – reducing real political choices into narrow, “acceptable” to the #nastyfew options.
The hidden cost was hollow societies, this system did produce growth. But hollowed everything out, communities weakened, industries disappeared, inequality exploded and politics lost meaning. People were told everything was fine, while their lived reality worsened.
So the anger we see today isn’t sudden, it’s delayed. The imperial layer is power without accountability at the global level, this system was held together by a dominant power structure. And here’s where the cracks deepen as rules applied selectively, international law was a tool, not a constraint, economic systems weaponised as needed. The result was a loss of legitimacy, as when rules are not applied equally, they lift the veil to stop functioning as rules at all.
We are now moving out of that world back to no longer having a single uncontested centre of power. Instead, we have competing blocs, regional tensions, fragile alliances and increasing militarisation. This is what’s called a multipolar world in #IR terms. Historically, these systems are unstable unless there are shared norms and limits, right now, those norms are weak or collapsing.
So we understand that the liberal #deathcult logic no longer works, globalisation is fragmenting, states are prioritising more self-sufficiency, supply chain control, strategic industries. The old idea of interdependence is now seen as a risk, not a safeguard.
Liberal ideas of democracy aren’t stabilising conflict, instead of reducing tension, elections amplify nationalism, reward confrontation leading to deepen division. The “#deathcult peace” is no longer holding, It’s a dangerous feedback loop, that without strong shared “rules”, the mess drifts toward proxy conflicts, regional wars, arms races and escalating mistrust. Even if full-scale war is avoided, instability becomes normal, and this instability feeds back into domestic politics – creating more fear, more reaction, more breakdown.
The deeper problem is #neoliberal exhaustion, we no longer treat the #deathcult as sacred and with #climatechaos and social break down our deaths are seeping closer. It’s now visible systemic exhaustion of the rule of the #nastyfew who built this era of #neoliberalism to prioritised finance over production, replaced politics with management, concentrated wealth and power and stripped away collective purpose.
This mess making didn’t resolve contradictions, it displaced them into culture wars, liberal identity conflicts and into abstraction. Now those social control is failing, we see the return of “history” where fundamental questions can’t be avoided anymore:
What is the purpose of the state?
Who benefits from the economy?
What do we protect and why?
How do we organise collectively?
This is uncomfortable, but necessary. As the previous era avoided these questions, this one forces them.
The #OMN perspective on this mess is compost, don’t collapse, that this moment is not just crisis – it’s raw material. The breakdown of the old system creates space, but we need to use the space, it’s why the #compost thinking matters – don’t deny the mess, don’t romanticise collapse, process it into something usable. Because if we don’t, the vacuum gets filled by reactionary politics, authoritarian control and deeper #mainstreaming mess.
The “end of history” wasn’t an achievement, it was a pause – built on unstable foundations. What we’re living through now is history restarting, messy, risky, uncertain. But also the first real chance in decades to build something that isn’t just a updated version of the same #deathcult logic. We might build a #lifecult if we can hold our nerve, and actually do the work.
So what comes next? We are moving from “stability” without meaning to instability with possibility. Yes, that shift is dangerous, but it also reopens agency, the question is no longer “how do we maintain the system?” It becomes “what do we build instead?”
The #KISS choice is the #OMN path to grow new #openweb, grassroots, trust-based structures, or we default fall back into more centralised, extractive systems?
Activism has a reputation problem, in default #mainstreaming storytelling it’s painted as chaos, absence, or naive idealism. But if you look at what activists at best actually do, a different picture emerges: a long tradition of people working out, in practice, how to solve real problems together without relying on distant authority. And that’s the bit most people quietly skip.
In most social/political movements, the hard questions – how we organise, decide, share resources, resolve conflict – are deferred. If people think about this at all – First you win power, then you figure out how things will work. That “later” rarely comes, or when it does, it arrives shaped by hierarchy, bureaucracy, and control.
The #OMN paths flips this. It starts at the micro level of how do a group of people share space? How do they make decisions without bosses? How do they deal with conflict, mess, bad behaviour, uneven effort and how do they build trust that actually holds under pressure? These are not abstract questions, they are everyday problems.
And this path – at its best – has decades (centuries, really) of paths with real answers like messy consensus processes, affinity groups, mutual aid, horizontal organising, temporary structures that form and dissolve as needed. None of it perfect, all of it is grounded. This is why grassroots activism works in real situations: disaster response, grassroots organising, protest camps, community projects. Because it doesn’t wait for permission or perfect conditions. It already has tools for acting now.
The messy bit is it’s not magic, let’s not romanticise this. Horizontal organising is hard, it’s full of friction. You get informal hierarchies, dominant personalities, avoidance of conflict until it explodes and burnout leading to #blocking of uncomfortable but necessary conversations. This is the same “poisonous people” problem you see in every movement. #4opens grassroots activism doesn’t remove it – it exposes it – and that’s actually the point. Instead of hiding dysfunction behind formal power, horizontal spaces push it into the open where it has to be dealt with. Or not – and then things fall apart, which is also a kind of clarity. In #OMN language, this is #compost, the mess isn’t a failure. It’s raw material.
Why this matters for the #openweb – most digital infrastructure is built on the opposite assumption. The #dotcons model says to centralise control, extract value, smooth over conflict, optimise engagement, hide the mess. It “works” – but only by disempowering people and communities. The #openweb path, if it’s going to mean anything, has to go the other way:
decentralised
messy
trust-based
human-scale
and able to function anyway
That last bit is where we can learn from anarchist practice, because building federated, grassroots media (like #OMN, #indymediaback, Fediverse spaces) is not just a technical problem, it’s a social one. The tech already basically works, the people part doesn’t – yet. Micro practice is the missing layer – What we keep hitting is the gap between having tools (#ActivityPub, servers, platforms) and having cultures that can use those tools effectively
You can spin up a server in an afternoon, you can’t spin up trust, shared norms, or collective process nearly as fast. This is where activist/anarchist thinking helps – not as blinded ideology, but as a toolkit:
how to run meetings that don’t collapse
how to distribute responsibility without losing coherence
how to handle conflict without defaulting to bans or dominance
how to balance openness with resilience
These are the problems that keep blocking #openweb projects. It’s about the clash: horizontal vs “common sense”. One of the biggest tensions is this is people default to vertical “common sense” – someone should be in charge, decisions should be quick, authority should be clear. And in moments of stress, that instinct feels right, but over time, it reproduces the same power structures we’re supposedly trying to move beyond.
So we get a cycle of start horizontal, hit friction, fall back to informal hierarchy, burn out or fragment then repeat. Balancing this cycle requires conscious practice, not just good intentions. For #OMN, this isn’t theory, it’s practical. If we want a functioning, grassroots media network:
we need to actively compost dysfunction instead of ignoring it
we need to balance “fluffy” inclusion with “spiky” clarity and direction
Otherwise, the social layer collapses long before the tech does. And then the #dotcons win by default, not because they’re better, but because they’re simpler in the short term.
The real opportunity here is to combine #KISS activist micro-practice (how people actually work together) with #openweb technology (how systems interconnect at scale). That combination is rare, and powerful. It gives us a path that is:
grounded (not abstract)
scalable (but not centralised)
resilient (because it expects mess)
and actually usable by normal people, not just #geekproblem specialists
This path isn’t useful because it promises a perfect future, it’s useful because it takes responsibility for the present. It asks – how do we make this work, here, now, with these people, in this mess? That’s the question the #openweb needs to answer, and if we don’t answer it, the answer we’ll get is more of the same, more #closedweb, more #dotcons, more #deathcult normality.
If we do answer it – even imperfectly – we start to build something else, something that grows not by control, but by practice.
