Tag: mainstreaming

Maybe we don’t then get the guillotine out…

Because current #mainstreaming, centrism, comfy pointless political “maturity” worked out so well, the last time we had a hard shift to the far right in the 1930s. Those “well-meaning” liberals at the time were patted on the back for their reasoned takes and rewarded for their civility right before it ended in a world war. That’s the dirty compost of history we’re all standing in today.

Fast-forward 100 years and today’s centrist are pretending not to smell the rot, their “middle path” has been disintegrating for the last 40 years. The old #mainstreaming legacy parties are crumbling into irrelevance, the dried leaves of the 40 years of #neoliberal wind. In the US, the corporate Democrats are led by animated corpses propped up by PR necromancy, while the #MAGA right eats their roting corpses, dresses in their cloth and steals their path, and without a blink of “common sense” gets away with calling it a revolution.

Meanwhile, people, the compost for real change, are screaming about inequality, rent, inflation, broken healthcare, unusable digital #dotcons infrastructure, and corporate theft of public services. But centrists hear all this and mutter: “Hmm, interesting. Now what could the problem be?” Western centrists stare into the rising far-right tide and scratch their heads, “shocked” that a decade of ignoring propaganda and letting fascists organize on #dotcons led to… #fascism. A real surprise outcome… Who knew that letting lies shout louder than truth in the “free market of ideas” might be a real problem?

Into that empty vacuum steps the hard right, waving ethnic nationalism and promising a future soaked in nostalgia and fear. What we need to say clearly is this is just another side of the same #nastyfew elitists hoarding wealth while selling fascism to the angry and disillusioned.

The only serious force that still tries to push back? The #fashernista fragmented, much-smeared left. In Germany, in France, even in the UK (before being gutted by #NGO centrists). What do our liberal centrists do? They blow smoke and mirrors, equating the left with the right: “One wants to redistribute wealth and build homes; the other wants to criminalize poor people and deport anyone not white. Clearly, both are equally extreme.” This is simply more mess to compost

So what’s the current centrist path? Steal the far right’s policies – but do it “sensibly.” In the UK, Starmer’s “Labour” has become Farage’s reform UK in a red tie. Deportations, austerity, privatisation, all served with a smug banal centrist grin. The outcome, voters, seeing no real alternative, just go for the real fascists instead of the fake centrist “liberal” remix. More mess to compost.

Macron did the same in France by burned his own coalition to stop any shift to the left, claiming they’re just as bad as Le Pen’s mess. Why? Because one side wants public housing and the other wants a racial purge. Yes the same.

So, why won’t centrists move left? The answer is simple, billionaires fund the centre. The left wants to tax them, so the rich choose death – not their own, of course, but ours. A sacrifice the 1% #nastyfew are happy to make from both the right and the “centre”. This is more than mess to compost, the old solution was a guillotine, do we have a different path this time?

Another alt centrist path? Imagine if grassroots parties dared to compost the past instead of embalming it. Imagine if they moved left, rebuilt public services, reversed neoliberal theft, and honoured the postwar social contract, you work, you live with dignity. This is in part what the #OMN is about: composting the #deathcult, seeding native projects with #4opens, growing radical alternatives in the cracks.

What everyone can now see is that the old centre is collapsing. What comes next? People urgently need to see is that we don’t need to move right with the claps of the centre, what we do need is to dig down, get messy, and grow something new – rooted, trust-based, and open. Because we’re not choosing between liberal decay and fascist fire. We’re making compost. And from compost, the future grows.

Maybe we don’t then get the guillotine out…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#KISS

Looking at building #OMN projects

An overview of projects

#Indymedia Classic

Most of the data is a common. Core flows:

  • Newswire (public, chronological): Anyone can post – and it will appear if they are trusted. It goes to moderation if they are not. This is mostly populated by editorial collective chosen trusted flows into the instance
  • Features (curated): Promoted stories written by the editorial collective from the newswire resources.
  • Hidden (private): Moderated view, not visible publicly unless let through by collective to newswire.

View Structure: Mostly fixed: Three flows, with some tag-based navigation as optional/secondary, so can think of this as a “fixed” news landing page with flows. A button to consume and create tag flows, the #makinghistory #UX

Editorial model: Collective moderation, through affinity group consensus.

Metaphor: Like a river (Newswire) feeding into a reservoir (Features), with a dam (Hidden) filtering out toxic waste.

#MakingHistory

Most of the data is a common. Core Structure:

  • Media object (any format) fragments?
  • Stories: Everything starts as a crafted piece (linked original fragments).
  • Tag-based flows: Rich tagging creates multiple dynamic timelines/streams of stories and fragments?
  • Moderation (private): Curators can review, prioritise, or archive
  • Interface: Inspired by Tweet Deck-style dashboards: multiple parallel tag/stream views.

Emphasis: Encourages narrative threading, historical context, and thematic clustering over time.

Metaphor: A garden of stories with paths (tags) between plots – some bloom, others get composted behind the scenes.

Shared DNA (and how #OMN fits)

Both: Are people-powered publishing systems. Use a public/private split for moderation and trust-building. Emphasize non-corporate, grassroots communication.

The #OMN acts as a bridge: letting projects like Indymedia and MakingHistory interoperate, share flows, and build trust networks across platforms – all within the ethos of the #4opens.

To be thought about:

The codebase/ActivityPub/OMN all have assumptions that likely need bridging.

Do we use groups to implement collective data – commons – we give admin rights over data by group membership? Then we keep legacy admin roles, but try and push them into the background and plan for them to fade away in the end.

Trusted/untrusted is this based on groups/instances/individuals/tag flow from source or general?

We need to add metadata to objects…

We need every object to be a wiki… This includes the articles – we end up with the Wikipedia of news based on organic trust groups and grassroots street news views rebuilding what it is to be #mainstreaming

More questions…

Stop chasing tech cults and start growing rooted alternatives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The #OMN isn’t just about media, it’s about building the social soil

We need to keep highlighting an old but still urgent tension: the intersection of technology and social change. In this too often unspoken divide, one side leans heavily on practical, technical problem-solving. They want working code, functioning systems, and tangible results, not abstract debates. To them, critiques about capitalism shaping code sound like distractions from the “real work.” The other side insists that technical problems are social problems. They argue that all code is written by people, shaped by culture, power, and history. Ignoring the social dynamics behind technology guarantees we repeat the same failures.

This divide plays out constantly in movements trying to bridge the worlds of #AltTech and social transformation. You see it in tensions between the tech-focused “geek” communities and broader #mainstreaming society. And both sides have blind spots.

The geek camp often falls into the #geekproblem: over-prioritizing tech innovation while ignoring the human and social context. Meanwhile, the #mainstreaming crowd tends to embrace vague social ideals while underestimating the soft power – and necessity – of building real technical infrastructure to support those ideals. Neither side alone can solve anything meaningful, especially not something as vast as rebooting the #openweb or to even start to touch on #climatechaos.

We need bridges, that’s what projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network), #OGB, #IndymediaBack, and #MakingHistory are about: building trust-based, grounded, people-powered platforms that can span the divide between tech and society.

But let’s be honest, there’s a lot of very bad behaviour on all sides of the #openweb reboot. Blocking progress, gatekeeping, aggression, virtue signalling… it’s all too common. Let’s try not to become prats, it’s easy to start, and hard to stop. Mess breeds more mess, prat-ish behaviour comes in waves. It aligns with waves of #mainstreaming and the reactive “alt” backlash, these tides bring a lot of flotsam, it’s up to us to shovel and compost what we can.

Our biggest block right now? The culture war postmodernist fog that has drifted through radical spaces over the past decades. It’s slippery, full of “common sense” that doesn’t hold up, but hard to challenge because it feels right. Composting this will be difficult, but necessary.

The #Fediverse is built on people-to-people relationships. Trust, not just tech, is the foundation. That’s why there’s a healthy pushback against “tech fixes” that try to replace social trust, a path that is much more common in places like #Nostr and #Bluesky, where algorithms and cryptography are too often seen as the solution to everything.

Yes, in reality, we need a balance of both. The debate is fluffy in places, spiky in others. But if we build tech-bridges to span this messy social terrain, we might actually get somewhere. This brings us to the hard green question: how do you scale local, eco-conscious solutions to a disinterested – and sometimes hostile – global population? Green progressives often promote small-scale, ethical living. That’s great for the 1% who can afford to live that way. But what about the other 99%?

Let’s be blunt: some people will die from #climatechaos. Maybe 9%, maybe more. But 90% will still be here, and they will need different kinds of solutions. Right now, the options on the table look like this: A rebooted, green-infused social democracy (the old Corbyn project was an example). A slide into eco-fascism and top-down “solutions” (the Trump path). Or doing nothing, and let #climatechaos run wild (the current #mainstreaming).

One thing is likely, a wartime economy is coming within 20 years, where there’s will be little room for the last 40 years of #neoliberalism, and “soft” liberalism will likely play a secondary role at best, the political landscape is shifting fast. The new #mainstreaming question is which side will you be on?

Because we need more than clean branding and good vibes – we need bold, practical, radical action rooted in both tech and human trust. We don’t just need freedom from the state and the #dotcons – We need freedom from our own dogmas.

The #OMN isn’t just about media, it’s about building the social soil where openness can grow, thrive, and renew. We need compost, and not just as a metaphor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mythos and traditions are needed for revolutions to grow roots

Composting the reboot funding

Dear Michiel,

At this point, it’s hard not to notice a pattern. You’ve received clear, thoughtful proposals aligned with your calls – yet no real engagement, year after year. I’ve said this gently before: your call-out text needs to be composted. If you’re not funding alternative, open, activist infrastructure – just say that. Don’t lead people on.

Look forward to seeing what did get funded – I’ll be writing something on that soon https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=nlnet

A post on why this kind of institutional #geekproblem push needs compost: https://hamishcampbell.com/we-need-to-compost-the-current-culture-of-lying/

Hamish

Not surprised. This is probably the 10th time we’ve applied to the #NLnet / #NGI fund over the years. Just heard back: our proposals for #OGB (Open Governance Body), #indymediaback, and #MakeingHistory were not selected – again.

“We are very sorry that we cannot offer you support for your good efforts.”

Sure, I, appreciate the polite brush-off again. But after so many rejections for solid, urgently needed tech projects that actually fit the funding goals, it’s time to name what’s really going on.

That there’s no #mainstreaming support for grassroots alternative, activist-rooted #openweb infrastructure. These projects aren’t pointless and inoffensive enough, not wrapped in shiny #NGO-speak, and don’t fit the comfy (in)circles of #geekproblem “innovative” funding. But they are native, they are needed, and they work – if you actually want a humane, federated, public-interest net that the funding outreach text says you do.

Time and again, we’re told these projects are “not selected” – Meanwhile, funding continues to flow toward a few good minority projects, a few #mainstreaming #fashernista alt tech projects, but the most goes to, minority interest, academic paths or closed bureaucratic #geekproblem circles, recycling the same stale stack of status quo ideas in slick/pointless packaging.

On balance, this is VERY much not building the #openweb – it’s way too often pushing #NGO and geek hobby paths or building another layer of the #closedweb under a friendlier mask. Yes, the is some small good done with this tech funding, it supports the big #dotcons copying Fediverse projects, no bad thing. But on the question of balance, we can see the lies.

We’re not discouraged. We’re composting this – as ever – into the next push. And yes, we’ll keep applying in till they change the text of the invites, so our projects are not the perfect fit they are now. Not because we believe the system works, but because we need to document the process if it works, well more when it doesn’t work, sadly. Composting lies is a part of the #openweb reboot.

If you do want to support native, trust-based, grassroots tech building, outside the NGO bubble, chip in here: https://opencollective.com/open-media-network or help to make this institutional funding work as it says it does.

A look at this narrow #NGO and #geekproblem point of view

The essence of the #geekproblem is its narrow, self-referential logic. Here’s a #spiky, pointed, prody view of the narrow track of thinking that defines the #geekproblem in the context of an #openweb reboot:

“There is no Emperor, King, or Priest in the Fediverse’s feudalism.”

The illusion is that it’s all flat – no power structures, just pure meritocracy. If you’re already a priest or acolyte, there’s no need to ask. You just do:

  • Want a new app? Code it.
  • Want a new protocol? Spec and ship it.
  • Want a new UX? Design it and deploy.

And if you can’t do it yourself? Then you kneel before the alternative establishment and pray.
Or, as they prefer to say, advocate.

This is both a critique of the (hidden) hierarchies and a mirror held up to the myths of autonomy and openness in the current #Fediverse culture. There’s a real power structure – it just doesn’t wear a crown, but if you look it’s VERY visible, people choose not to look, this is the #techshit mess we make and need to balance with healthy grassroots composting.

What would a #fluffy view of this look like?

The hard right path, the #nastyfew playing the Nazi card

In the current and historic right-wing path, the #nastyfew are mess making to mix and confuse social shit – like the recurring claim that Nazism was a left-wing movement, or at least contains left-wing elements as a mess making provocative and “controversial” statement. Let’s take a few minutes to look at this mess pushing argument (and Its confusion)

Hard right talking points:

  • It’s still “an open question” whether Hitler’s ideology was left or right.
  • Nazis called themselves “National Socialists,” so perhaps there’s a left-wing lineage.
  • No one has “done the analysis properly,”.

This is then framed in #mainstreaming pseudoscientific terms, borrowing credibility from the idea of science while avoiding rigorous historical or cultural context. This falls into #geekproblem territory where surface logic replaces any deep knowledge.

We need to spend time and focus to dismantle claim’s like this by highlighting the following:

  • Ideologies grow from shared cultural soil
  • You can’t categorize ideologies “left” or “right” – without considering the cultural compost they grew in. #4opens thinking reminds us to look at the process, not just the output.
  • Shared features ≠ same ideology, fascism does share tools, aesthetics, and concerns with both socialism and conservatism, because it arises from the same history and uses elements from both. This doesn’t make it “left-wing” in any way.
  • Ideology is not a checklist, the hard right idea to remove context is dangerously naive. Ideology isn’t a shopping list of policies – it’s a lived, embodied, blurry-boundary system of meanings, symbols, and affect. That’s part of the reason #dotcons and #NGO attempts at governance are floundering -because they think in terms of checkboxes, not compost.
  • Misunderstanding of culture, when we collapse evolutionary psychology into cultural history, it becomes #techshit reductionism. An example is when we try to explain 20th-century genocide using universalist “human nature” arguments, rather than the unique horror of a cultural breakdown under specific hard right (and its left shadow) political conditions.

It helps to use the composting metaphor, problematic figures come from messy soil. It’s possible to be honest about the rot and acknowledge resilience, #nothingnew might be helpful?

The danger in the hard right populists is in confusing the crowd, with intellectual sleight of hand using familiar #mainstreaming phrases (“science,” “open question,” “no one’s done this properly”) and mixed ideological references that feel insightful at a glance. Then icing on the cake is the #fahernista playing of personal vulnerability that is used to deflects criticism.

This is the hard right

Underneath this is a kind of cultural manipulation – blurring lines in a way that disorients rather than enlightens, it’s not critical thinking. It is an example of right-wing capture of shared cultural stories through contrarianism disguised as open-mindedness.

This is what happens when you let narratives drift unmoored from social history. It’s why we need to focus on grounding projects in native cultural understanding – because when you lose that grounding, anyone can hijack the conversation with pseudo-insights. In short, this hard right shit is composting badly. It’s fundamentally mixing rotten banana peels and plastic bags and calling it soil. It might look rich, but it won’t grow anything good.

You need a shovel, you help find one here https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

The #nastyfew, billionaires funders fear informed, educated public

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#KISS

Post inspired by @Npars

We need to compost lies, to build #4opens horizontal networks

We are now past the point where the #mainstreaming crew have effectively given up on mediating #climatechaos. What we’re seeing now is ONLY the performance of action – flashy, expensive, technocratic distraction designed to keep business-as-usual afloat a little longer. It’s no not about preventing catastrophe, or even mediating catastrophe, what we have now is managed #PR and keeping in place elitist continuity as this small #nastyfew and their sycophants visibly retreat from the growing mess.

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

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

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

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

For an alt #mainstreaming view
OMN, best not to get distracted, this isn’t about purity, it’s about direction
Composting the fiendly enemy

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

The current wave of #deathcult #mainstreaming of the hard right and “progressive” liberal left is less about progress and more about manipulating the human condition. It doesn’t offer real solutions, what it does do is pushes pacifiers. We live in a world where “common sense” alienation, loneliness, and meaninglessness are manufactured at scale, then sold back to us as control wrapped in empty promises.

Porn is loneliness sold as sex.

Alcohol is escape sold as fun.

Fast food is poison sold as nourishment.

Luxuries are emptiness sold as joy.

Video games are isolation sold as play.

Celebrities are ads sold as role models.

Drugs are numbness sold as happiness.

Social media is likes sold as friendship.

Smoking is addiction sold as relaxation.

Scrolling is distraction sold as downtime.

From the #dotcons

What we’re living through is not simply cultural and ecological decline, it’s the path of the #deathcult, replacing community with consumption, meaning with metrics, and connection with control. This cheap selfishness is the Trojan horse of modern misery. A social drug pushing, dopamine economy, engineered to keep us distracted, unfocused, passive, docile, and obedient, while the real decisions are made elsewhere, by the #nastyfew, elitists, institutions, and algorithms that grow and thrive on our social disconnection.

Where’s the path out of this mess? It’s not always easy, but it is possible. We compost the mess, not by withdrawing completely, but by rebuilding and bridging grounded alternatives – local, collective, messy, real. The #OMN (Open Media Network) is one such seed: a framework for reclaiming media, meaning, and mutual aid from the commodified hellscape of the #closedweb.

To step away from this mess, we don’t need more #dotcons platforms that capture our attention, we need native #openweb spaces that grow humanist trust. We need to re-learn how to talk, disagree, and create together without constantly being sold something in the process.

Best not to get distracted, this isn’t about purity, it’s about direction. When we shift the default away from commodification and toward community, we begin to detox from the #stupidindividualism trap we live in. We can begin to see more clearly, and from there, we build a different kind of world, not based on manipulation, but on meaning.

Let’s start, you need a shovel #OMN

Composting the fiendlyenemy’s

Composting the fiendlyenemy’s

These people are hopeless, in the literal sense of not having any hope.

The #mainstreaming of the #Fediverse is happening. You can see it in many “progressive” info flows, where the chattering classes of tech – academics, #NGO staffers, consultants, and developers with foundations or startup ties – gather to shape the narrative. On the surface, this looks like success: the native grassroots #openweb is being taken seriously. But look a little deeper, and the cracks start to show.

These are the #friendlyenemy – people who share some values, but whose institutional positions and funding streams push them toward compromise. On a good day, they’re allies. On a bad day, they become gatekeepers, smoothing out the radical edge of the #Fediverse in favour of comfort, control, and incrementalism.

You can smell the vertical path creeping in – softly, but persistently. Some voices are given more weight than others. Those who have access to money, credentials, or “platform” get to define the agenda. Those who don’t are politely sidelined. This inequality, dressed up in professional polish and well-meaning governance processes, is not native to the #openweb – it belongs to the broader culture of common sense #neoliberalism that says, quietly but firmly, “power follows money.”

One of the central issues here is signal-to-noise. These folks will acknowledge it if you ask, that real community voices are harder to hear, that grassroots actors are often overlooked, but in practice, they do little to shift the balance. The very structures they rely on (panels, funding calls, curated spaces) reproduce the same inequalities we’re trying to escape.

The “chattering classes” are not a new problem. In every progressive movement, there is a class of well-spoken, well-educated, well-funded individuals who dominate discourse without doing much of the risky, grounded work needed for real change. They often co-opt language, soften radical ideas, and set up systems that make it harder – not easier – for grassroots actors to lead.

So where do we go from here? We don’t reject these people outright, they are part of the mess we must compost. But we do challenge the structures that elevate them above others. We remember that the #Fediverse was born from messy, volunteer-driven experiments, not corporate playbooks. We prioritize horizontal spaces, open governance, and trust-based collaboration. And we keep building the #OMN and other alternative structures that reflect these principles natively, not as afterthoughts.

If we don’t, the #openweb becomes just another place where a different few speak for the many, and we lose the path in #NGO mess and the chance to build something genuinely “native”. What we don’t need is more non-native paths, please, we have enough #techshit to compost already. We do need ideas on how to communicate this to the people who need to hear?

#Fiendlyenemy

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