Appropriate technology in activist tech means tools built for our real contexts, not for Silicon Valley fantasies or bunker-dwelling paranoia. It’s about lightweight, repairable, understandable systems that communities can actually run, adapt, and share. Right now, the #geekproblem pushes us toward shiny, #dotcons shaped over-engineered toys that serve developer ego more than people and community need or bloated encryption stacks nobody understands, federated protocols that collapse under complexity, and endless half-finished “next big things” with no grounding in actual social use.
We need to drag the conversation back tofit for purpose, tech that works in the messy, underfunded, real world of activism, where trust and openness are the foundation, and security is woven in without becoming a fetish that locks us away from each other.
The #fedivers#openweb reboot of the last ten years is a good first step, but it embeds meany of the #mainstreaming issues and has the deep #geekproblems embedded into its culture and tech stacks. A second step away from this is, the social understanding, that security doesn’t come from code alone, it comes from the community that surrounds it. Without a living, visible, and shared culture, the best tools are just dead weight.
The path starts with embedding our tools inside open, self-documenting, collective cultures. If you can’t see how decisions happen, you’re just replacing one opaque power structure with another.
Forget the myth of the “perfect” platform. What we need are messy but resilient spaces, a diversity of nodes, loosely connected, each carrying its own part of the load.
Build commons-first infrastructure, to re-anchor our work in openness, federation, and trust-based networks baked in from the start. The baseline is #4opens – open data, open source, open standards, open process – non-negotiable.
On this path, the #OMN (Open Media Network) can be the publishing spine: a trust-based network where stories, actions, and knowledge move between activist spaces without corporate choke points and #blocking.
We must bridge into existing real-world struggles – unions, climate justice, housing fights. Tech that only talks to other techies is just another dead end.
Stop digging the same hole, we stop wasting energy on projects that make us smaller and weaker:
No more encryption fetishism. Encryption is the lock on the door, not the whole house.
No more closed, invite-only dev silos. If you can’t talk openly about the work, it’s either the wrong work or the wrong space.
No more “founder cult” projects that collapse when one person burns out or drifts off.
Security is not enough, survival is not victory, we can be safe and irrelevant – or vulnerable and changing the world by breaking corporate dependency, by building the infrastructure of a post-#dotcons world. This isn’t about perfect software, it’s about building the cultures that can use it – and win.
It turns out that what hackers yearn for is not raw power but security – not just the technical kind, but an emotional security that is harder to admit to, so it gets dressed up in the language and posture of technology.
Because many in these paths and spaces operate with narrow social and political horizons, shaped by individualist tech culture, a distrust of messy collective life, and little grounding in movement history, their insecurity rarely finds healthy expression. Instead, it gets channelled into #mainstreaming patterns: centralising control, hoarding decision-making, gatekeeping access. The feeling of safety comes not from trust, but from control.
This is why in so many “open” projects we see:
Root admin privileges treated like a personal bunker.
Technical gatekeeping replacing collaborative stewardship.
Social disagreements re-coded as “technical issues” so they can be “resolved” by force rather than dialogue.
The power they wield is a symptom, the insecurity is the cause, lack of balance is the disease. The problem is that command/control cultures make insecurity worse, they turn every challenge into a threat, every new contributor into a risk, and every disagreement into a test of dominance. Over time, this drives out the very diversity and collaboration that could create true resilience.
The #4opens – open data, open code, open standards, open process – is not just a governance checklist. It’s a practical, everyday discipline that forces a shift from control to collaboration. It changes the emotional terrain.
Open data dissolves the hoarding instinct, because nothing critical is locked away in one person’s vault.
Open code forces the bunker doors open, making it normal for others to touch “your” work.
Open standards create interdependence rather than dependency, reducing the fear of losing control.
Open process makes decisions visible, accountable, and shared, replacing the hidden backchannel with a transparent commons.
By practising the #4opens, even the most control-driven hacker can start to find a different kind of security, rooted in trust, redundancy, and collective stewardship rather than in solitary power.
The #4opens doesn’t magically fix emotional insecurity, but it creates a scaffolding of transparency and accountability where balance can grow. It turns projects from personal fiefdoms into shared ecosystems, and in doing so, helps people unlearn the reflex to seek safety only through domination.
The way out is not to strip hackers of influence, but to build cultures where influence is exercised in the open, with care, and where security comes from community rather than technological control.
A #fluffy view – Think of a self-hosted community chat platform, something small, privacy-focused, run by a handful of volunteer hackers. The core devs are brilliant, but they see every problem as a technical one: security means encryption upgrades, stability means more containerization, and governance means a GitHub permissions list.
When disagreements arise over moderation, they don’t trust open discussion. Instead, they quietly add admin-only tools that can hide messages or boot users without notice. From their perspective, this is “security”, keeping the platform stable and safe. But because the process is invisible and unilateral, it breeds mistrust. The community feels controlled, not cared for.
Now imagine this same project embracing the #4opens:
Open Data – Moderation actions are logged and visible to everyone.
Open Source – The code that runs moderation tools is public, so no hidden powers exist.
Open Process – Policy changes are discussed in a shared forum where everyone can contribute.
Open Standards – The platform can interoperate with others, so no one is locked in.
This changes the emotional root of the hackers’ insecurity: their “power” no longer depends on guarding the system against imagined chaos, but on participating in a transparent culture where the community itself holds the system together. Security is now mutual care, not technological control. The hackers still have influence, but it’s exercised in the open, grounded in trust, and shared with the people they serve.
A spiky view of this – The problem with too many hackers is that they mistake root access for moral authority. They wrap their emotional fragility in layers of SSH keys and sudo privileges, then strut around acting like benevolent dictators for life. You see it in the endless “code is law” sermons, in the backroom channel decisions, in the smug dismissal of “non-technical” people as if empathy were a bug. They lock down wikis “for security,” gatekeep repos “to avoid chaos,” and implement moderation tools that work like secret police. This is not liberation, it’s digital landlordism, the same power-hoarding rot we see in the #mainstreaming mess, just with a Linux hoodie instead of a corporate badge.
#KISS it’s best not to be either a dogmatic #fluffy or a #spiky prat about this need for balance.
“You’re preaching an idealised ‘community’ that doesn’t exist. You criticise the mainstream (fair enough) but keep pushing alternatives without showing a tangible model that works. It feels like you’re looking for an audience, not a conversation.”
And here’s my side of this:
I was part of the team that got multiple governments in Europe to adopt the Fediverse — working on the outreach that took the tech to the European Union.
I co-ran 5 Fediverse instances with thousands of users in its early years. We eventually had to shut them down — an experience I now talk about openly because we need to make this work better next time.
I’ve worked on meany of #openweb projects going back to the birth of the WWW. That history is here: https://hamishcampbell.com
Projects include UK #Indymedia, #VisionOnTV, the Open Media Network (#OMN), the #4opens framework, and the #OGB — all aimed at building governance, infrastructure, and culture outside corporate control.
Here’s the crux: building outside the mainstream is messy, fragile, and uncertain. There’s no guarantee that any of this will “win.” But the alternative – doing nothing and letting every commons be enclosed – guarantees failure.
The work is #DIY culture. If you don’t want to build, you don’t have to. But if you do, you have to accept the risk, the mess, and the fact that you won’t get the same dopamine hits as shipping a VC-backed app. You also have to resist the slide into trolling when frustration builds.
The real challenge is cultural: how to support tech that walks outside the dominant paths long enough to make new ones. That means building infrastructure that runs on trust, openness, and care, not just control, profit, and scale. If we stop doing this, every alternative will keep collapsing back into the defaults.
It happens every time. A fresh grassroots project kicks off, chaotic, joyful, full of promise. The code is rough, the conversations messy, but the energy is real. People come together not for money or prestige, but because something needs doing and no one else will do it.
Then, they arrive, the careerists, the chancers, the opportunists who talk a good game of “community” and “values” while quietly positioning themselves for influence, funding, reputation. You know these people, they start “facilitating” things, pushing for “professionalism,” organising pointless panels, and – without fail – introduce hierarchical management logic dressed in pseudo-horizontal language.
Soon, the messy collective space becomes an application form, organic conversations shift to curated “working groups”, governance becomes gatekeeping, code becomes control.
Careerism is a cultural virus, OK, these people aren’t evil villains, they’re simply products of their environment, trained to extract value, shape narratives, and build CVs. But their impact is destructive, even if unintentional. What they bring with them is the #mainstreaming mindset, a default toward #NGO logic, safe liberalism, risk-aversion, and the slow suffocation of wild experimentation.
They start to block with niceness., they silence with process, they smother with “inclusivity” until there’s no air left to breathe. When people question this, then they start to become nasty, trolling, blocking and finally ignoring runs its predictable course…
Examples? Let’s name some very formiler patterns:
The Self-Appointed Spokesperson – Shows up late, speaks the loudest, builds a personal brand on the back of others’ labour.
The Grant-Whisperer – Always chasing the next funder, reshaping the project to fit what’s "deliverable" instead of what’s needed.
The Gatekeeping Ally – Claims to represent the marginalised, while shutting down dissent and complexity with soft authoritarianism.
The #NGO Zombie – Thinks every grassroots space needs a board, a charter, and a code of conduct before it needs trust or purpose.
The Pivot Junkie – Tries to steer the project toward startup land “just to be sustainable,” and ends up reinventing capitalism in #FOSS clothes.
These types thrive when horizontality lacks grounding. On the path we need to take, “cancel culture” is a cul-de-sac. Blocking them just makes them martyrs. Ignoring them lets them take over. The alternative? Compost them, let their bullshit rot in the open, call things what they are. Tech is political, values are not neutral. What to do? Compost, don’t cancel.
To reboot the #openweb and keep it rooted in the #4opens: Open Code, Open Data, Open Standards, Open Process. Rebooting needs resistance, we have to build spaces that are both porous and protected, we need, paths and spaces with membranes, not walls. Trust-based collectives with clear boundaries. If someone’s treating your community like a stepping stone, show them the compost bin. If someone’s building with care, humility, and rootedness, then share our tools with them.
This is not a purity test, it’s composting as culture, if something smells off, trust your nose. Because if we don’t get serious about this, the chancers will take over. They always do. Unless we make the path too muddy for them to walk it.
A core problem is that too many “open” tech projects try to model social relations after code workflows rather than shaping code to reflect healthy social processes. Ersatz writing, ersatz governance and the slow death of the #openweb. We’re living through a wave of fakery. The #AI hype machine spews endless streams of ersatz writing – grammatically perfect, stylistically smooth, and hollow. It feels like content but carries no lived experience, no rooted context, no risk. Unedited, it’s a shadow play of culture.
The same hollowness infects too many horizontal tech spaces. Here, we find ersatz governance – systems that borrow the forms of openness and collaboration, but replace the substance with tech bureaucracy. Instead of starting from lived social practice, they mimic software workflows: people reduced to issue tickets, trust replaced by “process,” culture swapped for sprint planning. The result is the same as with AI: the outputs are technically competent but socially dead.
When governance is reduced to process, the door swings open for the chancers, the careerists, and the #NGO climbers. They’re fluent in the language of inclusivity and consensus, but they’re not here to build, these people thrive in systems where nothing is anchored in lived trust or collective history. In such environments, appearances are reality, and they control the appearance.
The mirror needs to flip, healthy social production can inspire healthy code production, but trying to run human interaction like a Git repo produces brittle, alienating cultures. We see it in the #Fediverse right now: meetings full of procedure but no warmth; #PRs merged while communities fracture; polished governance documents for projects this pointlessness.
The #openweb was never meant to be safe for professional managers of openness. It was meant to be a living commons, messy, unpredictable, full of disagreements and breakthroughs. If we can root our governance in actual relationships rather than corporate abstractions, we can build tech that reflects community rather than forcing community to reflect tech. Otherwise, we’ll just have two hollow empires – AI’s Ersatz Writing on one side, and our own Ersatz Governance on the other – both looking open, both feeling dead.
A community is only viable if enough people care enough to keep it relevant. In this era of #stupidindividualism, most people don’t lift a finger to make that happen.
This is the norm across many #4opens spaces: a near-total lack of interest in building or maintaining shared paths. It’s a textbook case of right-wing Tragedy of the Commons. Developers show up when it suits them, use the space for their narrow needs, then drift off without contributing to the upkeep. They treat community like free infrastructure – something passive they can extract from – rather than a living, tended path.
This same pattern plays out across the grassroots and #FOSS world. Devs focus on their code, their projects, their timelines. Rarely do they look up and engage with the broader ecology that their work depends on. In the #Fediverse especially, most developers ignore shared infrastructure, governance, and the standards they rely on, until something breaks. Then they complain.
Same social dynamics, same outcome: a mess that keeps repeating itself. And until we break that pattern, we’re stuck.
On the alt path, it’s fair to ask for clarity. When we talk about “#openweb projects,” we mean efforts grounded in the values of the early web commons: transparency, decentralization, collective ownership. This includes things like the rebooted #Indymedia, the #OMN (Open Media Network), and the #OGB (Open Governance Body). These aren’t about building shiny platforms, they’re about building the structures and relationships that allow real alternatives to survive and grow outside the #mainstreaming mess.
This isn’t just evangelism, it’s hands-on work: shaping frameworks for local and federated publishing (like the original Indymedia), and now modelling governance and trust systems that resist hierarchy and #NGO capture.
As for government institutions joining the #Fediverse – What we pushed was a bottom-up, native process rooted in people and practice, not imposed solutions. But as is often the case, after we laid the groundwork, the institutional #PR and #NGO crowd moved in and took over.
The “community” we speak of does exist, even if it’s fragmented, marginal, and ignored. You’ll find it in squats, permaculture collectives, activist media spaces, messy corners of the #Fediverse, and in the hands of people still building trust and tools outside the #dotcons. It’s not centralized or funded, so it’s not visible like capitalist platforms are. But it’s real. I’ve lived inside it for decades.
You’re right that real code is needed. But it’s not about one perfect tool. It’s about the network of trust and shared values that can hold many tools and projects together. That’s slower to build, less flashy to show off, but far more resilient and necessary.
The #Fediverse is a good first step. But let’s be honest: we’ve lost the thread when it comes to building tech that walks off the beaten path. Most #mainstreaming energy, and much of the #NGO outreach, still flows into reinforcing the same old ruts: centralization, enclosure, obedience to capital. Anything that doesn’t follow those routes is starved of support and often treated as a threat, a curiosity, or a waste of time.
But it’s exactly that off-path infrastructure we need, not just to resist the current system, but to outlast it. To still be standing when the old ways collapse. That means supporting tools and systems that aren’t profitable, aren’t convenient, and aren’t slick. They’re harder to fund, harder to maintain, but they’re what let us keep moving forward through the coming storm of #climatechaos.
If we don’t build and sustain these alternative tracks, the dominant ones will keep absorbing or destroying everything new. It’s a recursive trap: we need better systems to make better tools, but we can’t build those tools without some of those better systems already in place.
So we need to hold space – with care, mess, and trust – for that in-between.
That’s where projects like #OMN, the rebooted #Indymedia, and the #4opens live. Not trying to escape friction, but embracing it. Mediating it. Letting it guide us toward what’s honest, what’s native, what lasts.
The new litmus test isn’t “Does it scale?” It’s: “Does it spread? Does it take root? Can it compost and regrow?”
It’s important to recognise that friction – the mess, the slowness, the need for constant negotiation – is not a flaw in native paths, it’s a virtue. It’s how trust, mutuality, and accountability are sustained over time. These are not bugs to be eliminated with slick #UX and #VC-funded convenience – they’re part of what keeps a community honest and rooted.
The problem arises when less-native, often externally imposed systems (driven by capitalist or institutional agendas) treat these messy, friction-full spaces as broken or backwards. This is the classic dynamic of imperialism and settler colonialism: imposing order, “fixing” things, extracting value, and in doing so erasing the lived, relational logic of native systems.
If you look through the lens of native/western histories – indigenous struggles vs colonial modernity, the same pattern plays out again and again: the native path is degraded, disrespected, overwritten. In tech, it’s no different. You see it when horizontal, trust-based networks get steamrolled by #NGO capture, institutional gatekeeping, or #VC-funded platforms that sell convenience and control.
So the real work is mediation. Not purity, not retreat, but balancing these tensions in practice: holding space where native paths can grow without being co-opted or crushed, while still reaching out to shift the wider terrain.
We need to stop seeing native approaches as “immature” or “inefficient.” They’re often the only thing holding the line against complete enclosure. The question isn’t “How do we fix the mess?”, it’s “How do we stay with it, tend it, and let it teach us how to do this differently?”
It’s an old but urgent problem: how do we support tech that walks outside the dominant paths long enough to clear new ones? Infrastructure that can challenge the mainstream only survives if we build support systems that reflect different values — trust, openness, and care over control, profit, and scale. Right now, we’ve stopped thinking seriously about this. If we don’t return to this work, building the path as we walk it, we’ll be stuck cycling through the same traps, watching each alternative collapse back into the old defaults.
We need to start saying this more often, and without apology: there is a moral difference between left and right. Not just a difference in opinion, or strategy, or culture, but a real difference in the kind of people and world each side fights for. Left-wing politics, reflects our better human instincts: generosity, compassion, mutual care, sociability, conviviality, and courage. These are the values that hold communities together, that push back against cruelty and isolation, that imagine a world where no one is left behind. In contrast, right-wing politics are the organised expression of greed, selfishness, ego, bigotry, and fear. They hoard, they divide, they scapegoat, and they dominate.
It’s time we stop pretending this is just a polite disagreement and call it what it is: the left is the political force for good, and the right is the political expression of evil. Naming this clearly matters – because when we blur the line between solidarity and selfishness, we lose the ground we need to stand on. And note we need to put much of the hierarchical left on the right spectrum, it’s important to say this often as well.
Then on the centre path there’s a lot of #fluffy around these days. Take books like Abundance – dressed up as bold new visions, but really just more of the same old liberal centrism with a shiny, tech-friendly finish. It flirts with Marx at the end, but only to dress up in borrowed credibility. At heart, it’s not socialist, it’s a manifesto to reassure the #mainstreaming chattering class that everything will be OK if we innovate harder and manage smarter. This is blinded feel-good “supply-side liberalism” for the TED Talk crowd.
Let’s be very clear: the “problems of the modern Left” exists. Identity tokenism, #NGO capture, and aimless cultural navel-gazing have turned real struggle into performance art. But the answer isn’t to step back into the arms of liberalism or #techbro ideology – it’s to push further and deeper into balancing the path of radical collective politics. Not less left, but more grounded and grown-up socialism?
Because the actual problem isn’t scarcity, or inefficiency, or bad design. The problem is capitalism. Let’s spell it out: Capitalism needs artificial scarcity to work. That’s how it makes money. You think landlords want more housing to be built? Of course not. Flood the market with affordable homes and they lose their grip on rent extraction. Same with developers, they make their money by building just enough to keep prices high. It’s not a bug, it’s the core business model. We need to see this for what it is #miseryeconomics.
Take energy, the whole history of fossil fuels is cartels, from the Seven Sisters to OPEC, it’s a game of controlling supply to keep prices (and profits) up. It’s not about abundance, it’s about engineered shortage. Try fitting that into your neat little supply-and-demand graphs.
Even beyond housing and energy, the entire financial system is tied to the constant rise in asset values. You don’t keep Wall Street humming by flooding the world with free and accessible goods. You do it by enclosing, bottling, and selling scarcity.
So when these liberal optimists talk about “unlocking abundance” without touching class power or property relations, they’re missing the entire point. Or worse, helping to hide it.
What we actually need is a radical shift, that builds on grassroots cooperation, trust, and open systems. Not more shiny ethical #dotcons platforms or visionary #nastyfew billionaires, but boring, solid, stubborn collective action. We need commons, not commodities. Federation, not feudalism. We need to compost the #techshit, not polish it.
This is where projects like the #OMN come in – grounded in the #4opens and decades of lived, messy, practical resistance. Built to share, not to own. Grown from the ground up, not imposed from on high.
We’ve seen what doesn’t work. Let’s stop pretending that liberalism with a few wires stuck in it is going to save us. It’s time to build something real, together, and you get to chose to take the left or the right path. And on this choice, try not to be “common sense” evil in your choice.
Here is a trilogy of stories you can use for outreach if you take the grassroots left path:
If you need a working definition of the #geekproblem, it’s the habit, no, the reflex, of putting the social side of tech outside of tech. It’s the behaviour of someone sticking their head in the sand and mumbling, “That’s not my department.” It’s “I just write the code.” It’s “We’re neutral tools.” It’s “Let’s keep politics out of it.”
This isn’t just naivety, it’s a deep, culturally reinforced avoidance of responsibility. And it’s one of the key reasons why even alternative tech replicates the same failures and power structures as the mainstream.
Worse, this behaviour is often mainstreamed in the alt-tech spaces themselves, turned into best practice by #NGO people who should know better. It becomes active #blocking of any real progress on alternative paths. New governance? Too political. Radical accountability? Too messy. Grassroots involvement? Too slow. Let’s just build it and hope for the best.
We can’t afford this any more, in the midst of #climatechaos, rising authoritarianism, and the enclosure of digital commons, building better tools without building better relationships, better communities, and better politics is a dead-end.
This is the core of the #geekproblem, and if we’re serious about anything more than shiny toys, it’s something we must talk about at our conferences, meetups, and hackathons. Let’s stop pretending code is apolitical, let’s start with this: tech is social, or it is nothing.
Let’s be blunt, “inclusive” tech/#NGO events talk about change but don’t platform the people doing the hard, messy work of building this path. This is a real problem, rooted in comfort, control, and careerism.
Radical grassroots projects like the Open Media Network (#OMN) exist precisely to challenge the #mainstreaming mess, not to dress it up. We aren’t here to repeat feel-good slogans and deliver polished #PR. We’re here to offer lived solutions grounded in the #4opens and decades of collective, hands-dirty work.
So why should OMN and similar voices be invited in?
We speak from the grassroots, not the conference stage.
We build tools that people have historically used, not just write funding proposals about.
We hold space for #DIY, for #p2p, for real change, not only the reform theatre.
If your event doesn’t include these voices, like almost all of them, it’s the #mainstreaming problem of locking out knowledge, networks, and resistance, which the events #PR claims to support.
#KISS, this doesn’t need to be a fight, let’s make events better together. Can you imagine real dialogue between grassroots builders and NGO funders? Imagine shared workshops where friction leads to function, messy, honest space that acknowledges power dynamics – and really then starts to do something about this mess.
Want a better event?
Put grassroots groups on the stage, not just in the audience.
Pay people for their time — especially those working outside institutions.
Focus on practice, not just policy.
Drop the gatekeeping.
Build open process into your event — make your own structure accountable to the #4opens.
But, remember, we aren’t going just to play nice, to be seen, we’ll come to compost the status quo, and plant something that might actually grow. Let’s try and maybe do this right, please.
In this accelerating collapse – where #climatechaos spirals and #neoliberalism guts the very idea of society – we urgently need to confront a painful truth: it’s simple, the #nastyfew are a parasite class. And that this class feeds on the very foundations of well-being, survival, and joy that the majority of the global population desperately needs. They are the ones who keep the engines of destruction humming, not out of necessity, but out of greed and fear of irrelevance. These people and their institutions flourish precisely because most of us are lost in the distractions of #mainstreaming and false hopes of reform.
The big picture is Capitalism’s global predation – Zooming out, this is the capitalist class – those who own, hoard, and manipulate the resources, labour, and attention of billions. They weaponise economics, push debt, drive resource wars, and now greenwash their way through #climatecollapse while investing in bunkers and surveillance. They bankroll right-wing populism and push for austerity, while lobby for tax cuts as profits soar.
The close-up: People you might know, zoom in, and things get messier. This parasitic drive isn’t only held by billionaire industrialists. In many cases, it’s people close to us, sometimes unknowingly, sometimes not. These are the minor functionaries of capital, the wannabe gatekeepers, and the careerists who believe that “playing the game” will protect them from collapse.
In tech, it is clearer, parasites wearing hoodies. The Bitcoin Bros: Obsessively libertarian, they fetishise decentralisation while promoting hyper-individualist economics that mirrors the worst of Wall Street. They talk about freedom but build systems of exclusion, greed, and extraction. If you spend your energy pushing #crypto as liberation while ignoring ecological and social costs, you are enabling the parasite class – and likely dreaming of becoming one.
#Dotcons Executives: The Zuckerbergs, Bezoses, and Musks of the world are obvious examples. But look further down the food chain: the startup bros who pivot endlessly looking for #VC buyouts, the marketing execs who gut communities for ad metrics, the devs who code endless optimisations to squeeze more value out of users. If your business model depends on surveillance, addiction and enclosure, you’re the problem.
The careerist #NGO tech elitists: Yes, even the “good” sector can be captured. NGO professionals who endlessly hold conferences and produce whitepapers while blocking actual grassroots projects. They take seats at tables designed to exclude the people doing real, messy, transformative work. They don’t oppose the #nastyfew; they stabilise their control.
So what do we do? First, see clearly, name the parasitism. Understand that systems don’t just fail; they are designed to benefit the few and contain the many. Second, build bridges away from this mess – rooted in the #4opens: open data, open source, open process, and open standards. This is the beginning of composting the parasite class. Third, support native projects: not the VC-funded copies or the corporate-friendly NGOs, but the messy, local, collaborative tools and networks that build resilience and joy from the ground up. Projects like #IndymediaBack, #OMN, and others pushing against the tide are places to start.
Because in the end, the parasite class only exists as long as we feed it.
Let’s look at this from a prospective, both the W3C statement and the #OMN recognize that the early web was built with open sharing, decentralization, and public good in mind. The #W3C calls for a web “respectful of all participants,” which aligns with the #OMN goal of building an open media infrastructure based on the #4opens: open data, open source, open standards, and open process.
Where this W3C #mainstreamin alt path falls short (and why #OMN matters). The W3C vision speaks of “taking responsibility” and “addressing the impact of our work” through technical standards, but in reality, the current web’s architecture has been co-opted by centralized, profit-driven platforms (#dotcons) that dominate communication and content flow.
In reaction to this, the #OMN is grounded in the reality that technical fixes alone won’t solve these social problems, we need working activist cultures, grassroots governance, and federated media networks to actively challenge #mainstreaming and #deathcult values.
What #OMN brings is a social layer: W3C focuses on technology and ethics at the standards level. The #OMN focuses on the cultural and organizational infrastructure needed to build, sustain, and govern alternative media networks.
Scaling what worked: The W3C admits we’ve lost the “openness” to misinformation and data abuse. The #OMN is about bringing back what worked (e.g., early Indymedia, radical tech collectives) and scaling it using tools like #ActivityPub and the #fediverse.
Compost and regenerate: The W3C wants reform from within. The #OMN recognizes the need to compost the #techshit, grow anew, and create autonomous, federated spaces where community processes are native, not retrofitted.
A positive reboot (from within the #openweb), where the W3C gives us a narrative frame. The #OMN gives us a path to act. We can reclaim the web not only through better standards, but through working, lived alternatives – composting what failed, and growing based on what we know works.
We need bridging, if the W3C and groups like them are serious about rebuilding a humane web, then the #OMN path as much to offer:
A bridge to activist governance.
A working example of the Ethical Web Principles being practiced socially, not just technically.
A push for native, grassroots agency, not just safeguards built by the same #NGO centralizers who failed the first time.
Let’s do better, yes, but let’s also be native, that’s what the #OMN is about.
A thread on a different project on the same subject, “Open Source and Open Standards nerds like me ought to know by now that the protocol is the least compelling thing about a service. Who cares if your home is built using only Stallman-blessed tools, when the walls are full of rats?” https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/07/im-never-going-back-to-matrix
This post is talking in the sense of structure rather than individual experience. Let’s be honest, much of the so-called “alternative” tech scene is still stuck. Yes, we fled the #dotcons for something better, but ended up with copies of the same broken models. The #Fediverse, with all its potential, is still as often dominated by “mainstreaming meta” chat (“Twitter refugees incoming!”) or conspiracy-laden, #fashionista rabbit holes. It’s little wonder that even the nerdy privacy crowd struggles to find meaningful content or community. And no, shouting “fuck the system!” isn’t enough.
If we’re serious about systemic change, we need to do much more. The question is not if people will come, some always will, the real challenge is what they’ll find when they get here. Right now? It’s messy, insular, and missing the tools people need to use for change and challenge, let alone feel at home. We must move beyond building clones of corporate platforms and start composting the path that got us here.
This is why we need a reboot, not from scratch, but from memory. Projects like #indymediaback aim to reclaim 20+ years of working grassroots media practice. With tools like #ActivityPub we now have scalable tech that can bring those old social processes – based on #4opens (open code, open data, open governance, open standards) – into the present. The #OMN (Open Media Network) is such a path: combining the solid tech foundations with the radical social methods that we know worked (but didn’t scale).
To move at all, we must change and challenge the toxic norms of the #mainstreaming#deathcult, and yes, this means building real alternative identities and spaces that don’t live in the shadow of big tech. Being “alternative” used to mean something, and it can again, if we stop ONLY copying the mainstream and instead focus on nurturing something more strongly rooted and real.
This isn’t about being purist, #FOSS and Open Source already works in this way, the #OMN just brings this path to media and community infrastructure. It’s not utopian, it’s compost. And yes, that means dealing with hard questions, including our own funding. Let’s stop pretending we’re neutral when we’re not. Let’s build from honesty. It’s time to dig, plant, grow, and repeat.
NOTE: the comments below are a useful example of #stupidindividualism, and remember this hashtag is about social groups and their #blocking of social thinking. The history matters, flaming is not a useful response.
#mainstreaming narrows the field of imagination and excludes non-conforming ideas that could offer real solutions to systemic crises. Mainstreaming smooths the rough edges of society. It normalizes hierarchy, filters dissent, and packages politics into manageable narratives. It’s how radical demands are turned into reforms, then paperwork, then slogans, then forgotten.
Absorbing opposition into bureaucracy (e.g., NGOs, dead end consultancy)
Rewarding compromise and incrementalism, as blocking
Silencing or caricaturing grassroots resistance, as common sense
Making real alternatives seem "unrealistic", in the end
This is why grassroots #DIY matters as a counterbalance. On this path, Anarchism is not just rebellion or chaos, it is a living tradition of thinking and organizing that keeps real change alive when mainstreaming works to bury it.
Direct democracy, In a world of managed participation and elitist mediation, anarchism says: decide together, act together. It reminds us of grassroots power that doesn’t flow through institutions but grows in assemblies, co-ops, camps, and communities.
Mutual aid and cooperation, where mainstream narratives focus on competition, profit, and security through control, anarchism champions care, solidarity, and trust-based networks—a needed cultural shift to navigate crisis and collapse.
Decentralization of power, in the face of #dotcons, technocracy, and corporate-state collusion, anarchism is a map toward decentralization and autonomy. It’s the logic behind federated systems, commons governance, and resilient localism.
Critique of state power, mainstreaming always ends up strengthening state structures, even when it claims to oppose them. Anarchism pulls back the curtain on the violence and coercion baked into “order”, whether in border regimes, policing, or “benevolent” welfare systems.
Cultural compost: “We need anarchists unencumbered by anarchism.” at its best this isn’t an identity, it’s a provocation, a composting force that keeps movements from hardening into systems of control.
This is why balance is key, without radical, un-mainstreamed perspectives, the so-called “left” drifts into hollow #NGO work, tech utopianism, or sanitized liberalism. The #openweb becomes a product instead of a commons, movements become brands, justice becomes PR. Balancing #mainstreaming means, keeping the imagination alive, creating space for alternatives and building systems that don’t replicate domination
In practice, projects like the #OMN and #4opens are examples of this balance: using basic tech to empower trust, not control. They are rooted in values without needing any label, community autonomy, voluntary association, transparent processes.
To reboot the #openweb, we need the cultural DNA of anarchism, without necessarily the costume. We need people unafraid to challenge power, even when everyone else says, “play nice, get the grant, follow the roadmap.” So yes, we need anarchism, not as a lifestyle, but as a counterweight, a cultural inoculation against decay to challenge the centre from the edge.
And we need to compost the rest.
The mess we make trying to move away from the mainstream…
“Doing the same thing in the same context and expecting different results is one of the clinical definitions of insanity.” 😄
The truth is, we’ve already solved many of these problems. From grassroots media to consensus decision-making, from tech co-ops to decentralized organizing, we had working solutions. What we lacked was a way to scale them without breaking them. That was always the sticking point. But the irony: the activist culture that once created these solutions has eroded, just as the tech finally caught up, the tech is ready, it’s the culture missing. This is the mess we’re in.
It’s about social trust, human-scale processes, messy cooperation, and doing things differently, this time with tools that match our values, not bury them. Let’s stop acting insane, let’s try something new, built from something old, let’s get biblical 😉
Capitalism, especially in its late-stage #neoliberal form, has always had significant structural problems. In recent decades, these problems have been amplified and globalized through digital platforms, what we call the #dotcons. These companies are not a break from capitalism, they are its most refined, efficient, and extractive version to date.
Income Inequality
Traditional critique: Capitalism concentrates wealth in the hands of those who own capital (factories, land, assets), while workers receive only a small slice in wages.
#Dotcons example: Big Tech CEOs and early investors have become some of the richest people in human history – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg – while gig workers and content creators struggle to survive.
Amazon workers are notoriously underpaid and overworked, with high injury rates in warehouses. Meanwhile, Bezos took a vanity trip to space.
Uber/Lyft drivers bear the cost of vehicles and insurance, receive no job security, and can be "deactivated" (fired) algorithmically with no recourse.
Exploitation
Traditional critique: The wage labour system is inherently exploitative, profits come from paying workers less than the value they produce.
#Dotcons example: Digital platforms exploit user-generated content while paying creators next to nothing.
YouTube demonetizes videos arbitrarily. Creators build platforms that YouTube controls and profits from.
Facebook/Meta builds its empire off unpaid emotional labour — your social life, your attention, your photos — monetized through surveillance and advertising.
TikTok algorithms suck in youth creativity, reward a few, and discard the rest. The work is free, the profit is centralised.
We’ve all become digital piece-workers, feeding the machine with likes, posts, and swipes, and we’re not even getting wages anymore.
Environmental Degradation
Traditional critique: Capitalism’s drive for infinite growth in a finite world results in ecosystem destruction.
#Dotcons example: The cloud isn’t light and airy, it’s made of data centres that consume vast amounts of energy and water.
Bitcoin mining (driven by capitalist speculation) consumes more electricity annually than Argentina.
AI training for LLMs (like ChatGPT) has a massive carbon footprint, often hidden behind “green” branding.
Amazon delivery and consumption cycles have increased packaging waste and pushed unsustainable shipping logistics into overdrive.
Digital capitalism gives us the illusion of “clean” convenience, but its ecological impact is profound and accelerating.
Short-Term Thinking
Traditional critique: Shareholder capitalism focuses on quarterly profits, not long-term well-being.
#Dotcons example: The platforms build attention economies, short-term dopamine hits over sustained engagement, destroying social discourse and democratic culture.
Twitter/X encourages outrage over insight. Algorithmic virality means trolls win.
Facebook actively promoted divisive content because it increased “engagement.”
Startups "move fast and break things" without repairing the damage. Few are held accountable.
Product design is driven by venture capital exits, not by usefulness or ethics. Tech isn’t solving problems; it’s creating new ones, faster.
Lack of Access to Essential Goods and Services
Traditional critique: In capitalism, basic needs like healthcare, housing, and education are commodified, your access depends on your income.
#Dotcons example: Digital access is the new essential, but it’s increasingly paywalled and monopolized.
Google Classroom became a default education tool during COVID — but it’s ad-funded, tracks users, and lacks transparency.
Zoom and other platforms required for remote work/schooling are corporate-run silos, with data surveillance baked in.
People in the Global South are increasingly pushed into “zero-rated” Facebook and WhatsApp ecosystems — giving up digital autonomy for basic access.
The digital divide isn’t just about cables or bandwidth, it’s about who owns and controls the networks we rely on.
From Capitalism to #Dotcons to #Deathcult, the digital platforms didn’t disrupt capitalism. They turbocharged it. What we’re witnessing now isn’t just Big Tech behaving badly, it’s the logical endpoint of capitalism in a networked world. The #dotcons replicate and intensify the worst features of capitalism:
More control with less accountability
More labour with less compensation
More growth with more destruction
They’re efficient machines of extraction, cloaked in the language of innovation and empowerment.
What’s the Alternative? We need to stop asking how to “fix” the #dotcons and start building outside of them. That means:
Supporting the #fediverse and #ActivityPub as protocols of freedom and decentralization
Backing grassroots media and alternative tech through projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network)
Embracing the #4opens
Fighting back against #mainstreaming capture by NGOs and foundations that reproduce power hierarchies
Prioritizing trust over control, cooperation over extraction, and commons over private platforms
We need to name the problem for what it is: Capitalism – digital or otherwise – is incompatible with the future of people and planet. It’s past time to compost it and grow something better. As a first step, let’s build tech that reflects our values, not just our fears #KISS
The current ecosystem of alternative and grassroots media is too narrow in its imagination of what media could, and should, be. There’s a persistent naivety or, in some cases, a self-serving dishonesty. Many of the most “successful” progressive media groups continue to mimic #traditionalmedia without understanding, or addressing, the fact that they do not control their distribution. In effect, they’re renting space in someone else’s empire.
This is not just a mistake. It’s the same mistake that corporate media has been making for years: relying entirely on the #dotcons, especially Google/Meta/Facebook, to reach people. The algorithms shape the message. The gatekeepers never disappeared, they were replaced by code, powered by ad dollars.
Where are we now? Most grassroots and alt-media outlets do have websites, which means they technically sit on the #openweb. But their sites rarely, if ever, link to other alt-media projects. Despite the rhetoric of solidarity, there is little visible network of mutual support, not even basic hyperlinking between allies.
They podcast, another foot in the #openweb. Yet their outreach and engagement still happen inside #silos like Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts. In practice, this reinforces the #deathcult’s control of visibility. You can’t build a new world inside the structures of the old, not if the old is designed to undermine you. Why is this mess happening? Two dominant forces are shaping this failure:
Many alt-media producers came of age inside the mainstream tech stack. They built their platforms and careers inside the same closed systems they claim to challenge. Their political commitments might be radical, but their infrastructure choices are entirely conventional. This is the liberal, capitalist version of #mainstreaming – reform, not replacement.
At the other extreme, we have alt-tech projects so obsessed with privacy and control that they create pointless parallel networks that no one uses. They fetishize encryption and “clean standards” over actual human use. The result is tech that is “safe” but irrelevant, drifting into a shrinking ghetto of #stupidindividualism. This is the libertarian version of #mainstreaming – escape, not engagement.
The has been practical work on the ground, over the last years an #openweb tech revolution built around ActivityPub and Fediverse, with projects like Mastodon, which in theory is guided by the #4opens. Yet, despite this, we still hit a wall of self-interest, naivety, and careerist short-termism from the media groups and meany individuals inside this movement.
What can we do? The web is made of links, the #openweb dies without them. If alt/grassroots media want to be part of the solution, they must start acting like a network. A simple step is to start linking to each other. Publicly. Repeatedly. On websites. On blogs. On Fediverse accounts. Use hashtags. Use lists. Tag each other. Cross-publish when relevant. This one act can change the ecosystem.
To solidify this, it’s past time for a new alt-media reboot, a small crew of linked-up, working examples that can pull others onto a sustainable, #openweb path. A real, living network of trust and mutual visibility. If we can show what’s possible, by doing it, we might begin to shift the culture. Let’s find the hopeful, grounded people to help shovel this forward.
Encryptionist geeks obsessed with crypto but forgetting human users
NGO social media managers who talk community but build silos
Process vampires who kill projects by committee
Fashionistas who follow hype cycles and abandon working tools for shiny vaporware
The #OMN is native to none of these tribes. That’s its strength. But also why it’s often ignored or misunderstood. No permissions, no gatekeeping, no central database. It just works. That’s the #KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
None of the usual suspects like this: Geeks: Don’t like using old tools like RSS or thinking socially. Politicos: Prefer being seen at the cutting edge, even if it leads nowhere. NGOs: Want measurable outcomes, not messy grassroots growth. But we need to stop building castles in the sky. Start building bridges instead.
The real block? The mental model of our tech and political culture. We’re still thinking in terms of silos, ownership, and control.
