Compost, not illusions, is a first step – A radical look at “light green” tech – For a second step we need a useful compost layer for growing native projects, like the #OMN. What we currently have in most so-called “green technology” promoted through #mainstreaming and #fashernista narratives is not ecological in substance – it’s performative environmentalism, built on omission, distortion, and branding. To help make sense of this mess, let’s use the lenses of the #4opens, the #geekproblem, and the broader #openweb.
The mess is “green” as branding, not substance. Most of today’s #mainstreaming “green” tech, like, electric vehicles (EVs), solar panels, wind turbines – is “green” in aesthetics, not in impact. These are products sold as solutions, but they’re too often rooted in the same extractive, centralized, and opaque paths and systems that caused the problems in the first place. This is the heart of the lie we need to compost, as the needed social change cannot grow from toxic soil, no matter how glossy and plastic the flower appears. If we ignore the roots, we get more illusions.
Watch this critique: The True Cost of Green Tech (YouTube)
The #OMN critique is to move past the false solutions and the broken paths. Yes, light green solutions pushed by institutions and NGOs aren’t inherently bad technologies – but their production, distribution, and governance models are deeply flawed. They violate every principle of the #4opens:
Open data: No honest accounting of full lifecycle impacts.
Open source: Dominated by proprietary, locked-in systems.
Open process: Controlled by corporations and states, with no meaningful public input.
Open standards: Sacrificed for monopolistic vertical integration (e.g., Tesla).
The result is more #techshit – waste and violence hidden behind shiny #PR branding. Even our weak #NGOs point out the brutal costs: resource extraction (cobalt, lithium, rare earths), labour exploitation (child and Uyghur forced labour), and environmental dumping. These costs are buried beneath greenwashed PR aesthetics, making them palatable to consumers but invisible to our shared, and needed critique.
The #geekproblem, the “problem” in much geek culture, is tech as saviour, this is the belief that technology itself is inherently progressive. This takes us down the paths where proposed “fixes” like nuclear follow the same flawed paths: centralized, capital-intensive, top-down systems cloaked in the language of innovation. It’s new wrapping, same old crap.
This is not a path to climate justice. It’s a continuation of the #deathcult – digital colonialism powered by extraction, slavery, and silence. No genuine social or ecological transformation can grow from this poisoned foundation. Where the real cost of “green” tech is not just ignored, it’s deliberately silenced. This silence isn’t accidental; it’s structural. The narrative that we can “buy better things” and consume our way out of crisis is a pacifying lie. It sells comfort, not change.
True ecological technology must be social first. It should grow from transformation, not transaction. We need to compost the lies to grow real alternatives. We must compost the #mainstreaming myths-this is the role of #hashtag stories.
There are meany paths to take, the one I focus on is reclaiming small-scale, peer-produced infrastructure. Using the #4opens to demand transparency, accountability, and participation. Solar panels and EVs have a role, but only when embedded in a radically #degrowth paths: Open governance (#OGB), local, decentralized production (right to repair, community assembly), circular economy (reuse, repurpose, recycle), humanism as non-negotiable (no slavery, no offshoring of harm). It’s a simple, not to say old-fashioned idea of humanistic progress, maybe we can do this better this time, I hope.
Conclusion, please #KISS the illusions goodbye, build the compost heap. Now also, please remember, we are not against technology – we’re against the lies that accompany it. As long as we keep lying about the nature of change, we cannot begin the real work. We need fertile ground – a compost layer for native projects like the #OMN – to push openness and cultivate the genuine ecological thinking we need to grow. It’s way past time for people to lift their heads from worshipping the #deathcult and stop being prats about this.
This spirit of the early internet and #WWW – sharing, remixing, collectively creating – is the heart of what we once called the #openweb. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a space of possibilities, commons, where you could take what you needed and leave something behind, hyperlink by hyperlink. The tools were open – #RSS feeds, #APIs, #XMPP, #indymedia were built to bridge between ideas and movements, not walls of monetized algorithmic sludge we have today.
But the #dotcons came. They fenced in the wild garden. What we’re living through now is a digital version of the enclosure of the commons, a #neoliberal land grab dressed in Silicon Valley T-shirts. Just like in 16th-century England, they drew arbitrary lines around our #4opens shared land (data, conversation, culture), declared it private property, and shut the gates. And we, the people, got algorithmic slop in return.
The comparison isn’t metaphor – it’s literal. Just as the landed gentry stole the commons to fuel the industrial revolution, the tech gentry stole our digital commons to feed surveillance capitalism. They did it through legalese, marketing BS, and brute force. We were left outside the firewalls, told to be thankful for “free” services while they harvested our metadata lives to sell back to us as advertisements and social control.
The #techbros didn’t invent this theft. They just updated the tools, the same ideological mess that displaced peasants from their land now displaces communities from their networks and platforms, kills independent sites, closes APIs, and locks away archives behind paywalls. Twitter’s 2023 shutdown of free API access? A textbook enclosure. Hundreds of # fashionista grassroots tools and bots vanished overnight, #Techshit at its most brazen.
And then there’s #RSS – the veins of the old web. Stabbed slowly. First by Facebook, then by Google. For the #fashernistas, the blade fell hardest in 2013 with the death of Google Reader, a quiet coup that pushed most of us into the fenced-off gardens of algorithmic consumption we live so much of our lives in today. The commons didn’t vanish; it was actively destroyed, under the smog of monetization, “engagement,” and corporate “safety.”
This isn’t #progress, it’s theft. The same kind that wears the mask of legitimacy because lawyers and lobbyists made it look neat on paper. The reality is old, it’s a #classwar fought with code instead of clubs, and it’s won because we stopped remembering what common “land” even looked like.
But not everything is lost. The #Fediverse, the #OMN (Open Media Network) still plants seeds in the cracks. #Wikidata, #OpenStreetMap, the #ActivityPub protocol, these are digital hedgerows that survived the scorched earth. They are messy, collaborative, and unmonetized. That’s their strength, that’s what the #fashernistas to often don’t get – they can’t sell what they can’t own.
The #geekproblem here is fatal, in both the grassroots and the #dotcons, too many technologists are blind to the politics in their code. In the #mainstreaming, they build better tools for corporations that destroy the commons. Over and over again. The solution? For the grassroots coders, compost the #techshit, seed something else, and reclaim what was always ours. As when we lift the lid, the #dotcons mess our unthinking #fashernistras, #NGO geeks call the internet is simply a thin veneer on top of what is actually ours, the #openweb
Let’s stop being polite about this. The #closedweb is a crime scene. The platforms we rely on are bonfires of common culture, feeding the engines of the next wave of control. If we don’t remember how we got here, we can’t get out. It’s time to say it plain: The privatized web is a #deathcult, and only a #4opens reboot can bring life back.
The #mainstreaming narrative around power tends to centre on institutions – on policy boards, corporate elitists, and those privileged enough to claw their way up the slippery sides of crumbling hierarchies. But that’s not where most of us live, and more importantly, it’s not where real change and challenge takes root.
Too often, we miss this balance, we “forget” that we have direct power and influence over the grassroots, because we are the grassroots. We are embedded in networks, collectives, and everyday moments of solidarity and resistance. It’s here, in our own spaces, that we can compost the mess into something fertile, resilient alternatives born of shared struggle. By contrast, our power over “them” – the #nastyfew, the policy-makers who ignore us, the corporate class – is minimal unless we shift the frame from the bottom up to acturly included them against their will.
To see a clear and useful example of top-down critique done right – or at least with an honest attempt to redirect power – look to the new #CBC podcast series Who Broke the Internet? Where Doctorow lays out a thesis many of us have known intuitively, the internet, and the #dotcons that grew like weeds across it, were not victims of some inevitable collapse or unstoppable tide of “network effects.” No, it was broken by design. Through deliberate choices, made in plain sight and often against clear warnings. It was policy. It was enclosure. It was centralization. And the ones who did it? Some were the #nastyfew, sure. But many more were #fashernistas chasing the next hype wave, while the #geekproblem stumbled behind them, building systems that locked us in. Now we live under a kind of techno-feudalism – run by the #broocracy, the #geekproblem made “good”, the unwitting nobles of a new authoritarian shift.
Doctorow’s work isn’t just about assigning blame. It’s about dismantling the myth of inevitability. The so-called #enshittification of the internet wasn’t fate, it was a process we can understand, interrupt, and reverse. That clarity offers the possibility of agency. And more than nostalgia, Doctorow attempts and likely sadly likely mostly fails to articulate a future-facing vision of an internet rebuilt to meet the radical demands of our time: from #climatechaos to oligarchy, fascism, and digital colonialism.
Where his work meets more “us” focus is in this core tension – top-down insight and bottom-up action. Doctorow maps the wreckage and names the architects. But it’s up to us to compost what’s left and grow something new. We rebuild with our hands and hearts, in our local contexts, among people who still care. That’s where resilience grows. That’s where the #openweb is rebooted.
There’s a nice post by Elena Rossini’s, “This is what resistance to the digital coup looks like.” she is commitment to the #Fediverse, #FOSS tools, and open publishing solutions, and her critique of #VC-funded platforms like #Substack and #Bluesky is needed. At the same time, it’s worth pausing to reflect on how we talk about these things, particularly when we’re speaking to an emerging audience, still navigating the gap between centralized tech and more native, grassroots tools. Because while we do need clarity, we also need care. Otherwise, we risk turning signal into noise.
Rossini’s article is a good example of how alternative infrastructure begins to reach broader consciousness. Many of the platforms she champions – Ghost, Beehiiv, and even certain curated Mastodon experiences – fall within or adjacent to the broad #4opens networks. They are a part of the solution. But they also carry baggage. Some are corporate-lite. Some depend on foundation funding. Some straddle a line between truly open and VC-sanitized.
This isn’t a problem per se, but it’s important to be transparent about it, many of us in the radical grassroots space, those nurturing compost heaps of alternative media, peer publishing, and federated community infrastructure – have seen what happens when clarity is lost. The #NGO-ization of resistance. The capture of the #openweb by polite #PR. The story gets smoothed out, the needed risk disappears, and the power we need to shift can simply be adapted and absorbed.
Let’s name the agendas, kindly. We’re not calling anyone out, quite the opposite, this is a call in. A reminder that it’s polite and politically grounded to acknowledge the agenda and position of the tools we use, even more so the ones we promote. Are they native to the grassroots? Are they part of a transitional bridge? Are they compromised in some ways?
Rossini’s argument – that using Substack and Bluesky while denouncing Big Tech sends a mixed message – is fair. But the same critique could be gently extended to Ghost and Beehiiv, too. These aren’t immune from #mainstreaming pressures. If we want to build a truly alternative infrastructure, we have to be honest about what’s native, what’s transitional, and what’s being branded as “alternative” without any deeper roots.
The #4opens as compass, one tool that helps us make these distinctions is the #4opens: open source, open data, open process, and open standards. It’s not a purity test, nothing ever should be, but it gives us a compass. A way to orient ourselves as we navigate the mess. A platform might look open because it feels different from Big Tech. But if it lacks open process, if its governance is closed or opaque, then it’s not truly part of the alt path. If it uses open source code but locks users into proprietary hosting or hidden metrics, that’s worth noting too.
This doesn’t mean we throw out every tool that doesn’t tick all four boxes. It means we contextualize. At best, we practice a kind of digital literacy that includes politics, power, and history, not just user experience. Clarity is compost, Rossini’s voice is part of a broader chorus rising in defence of a better “native” web. That’s good news, but let’s make sure that as more people join this space, we compost the confusion, not spread more of it, some things you might want to do as good practice:
Choosing native language when we can (use “open publishing” or “independent Fediverse platforms” rather than brand names as default). #openweb is a powerful statement in itself as it contrasts to #closedweb.
Naming the agendas behind the platforms we use or promote.
Valuing bridges, but not confusing them for destinations.
Practicing digital humility, so we can learn without defensiveness.
There’s little clarity to begin with, let’s help each other work through the compost, with bare feet and open minds, toward something truly rooted in the commons. And yes this will mean dirty feet and hands 🙂
At Balliol, the event is thick with what I’d call posh gits. The event felt conservative, not just politically, but in the deeper, old-school, institutional sense. The air was deep with entitlement. The room was full of young wannabes, the privileged types who don’t need to try, the future “elitists” rehearsing for their inheritance.
The line-up set the tone:
The older “priests” of the cult
First up, a writer for The Spectator.
Then a student from Dublin, the token woman?
Finally, a smug young man who writes for The Times and a news blog – Unheard basically right-wing student cosplay.
The first guy? A damp squib. A classic Tory prat with nothing to say. He took a predictable swipe at the “fashionable” paths universities have taken, diversity, equality, inclusion checklist from a conservative, nostalgic lens. His question, “Who does the university serve?” landed flat. He missed the moment entirely, pining for a return to the old order while ignoring the real crisis: who has power now, and how it’s wielded.
Next came the debating society woman. Equally, damp. Her speech was a buzzword salad of all the boo-words “they” used to signal disdain for anything progressive. It was as if someone had copy-pasted a Times’ opinion page into her brain. No spark. No substance. Conservative zombie thinking, the kind we thought had decayed along with the rest of the mainstream mess. Her conclusion? Bow to the establishment. Academia, she said, is about “developing character.” Whatever that means in this context, it sure didn’t sound like any challenge to the status quo.
Then the last guy. God help us. Public school, of course. He opened with “woke”, and the room laughed. He played the “fascist” card as a joke. More laughs. Eventually, he got to the point: universities, he claimed, are driven by bureaucracy following social trends. His example? In 2011, gender became the vector of change. Now, in his area, philosophy, bureaucrats impose “care” as a form of control. A tangle of half-thoughts and culture war agenda. He described a shadowy “bureaucratic class” at the heart of the university, the deep state of academia. The audience chuckled. But behind the lols, there was a whiff of fear?
Later, an older man, the priests of the cult, responded patronisingly to a question from a young right-wing woman. She asked something in earnest, and he waved it off like a bore at a dinner party.
Then a #fashernista liberal offered a question that began with all the right liberal signals but ended on a strangely rightward note, a sort of horseshoe moment in miniature.
One posh git got up to ponder: “Are universities for jobs or knowledge?” No mention of progressive public good, human flourishing, or collective liberation, just the normal #mainstreaming.
A recurring theme was the power imbalance between bureaucrats and academic staff, with students positioned as consumers, granted power by their tuition fees. The marketization of education has become normalised, ironically, these people hate markets and love hierarchy, so long as they sit comfortably at the top.
The panel discussed Blair-era university expansion as a kind of moral failing. Universities, have grown too big to care about individuals. A strange complaint from people who seem fine with the erosion of care as a value in every other domain.
What was missing throughout? Any real commitment to learning. Any fire. Any imagination.
Instead, we got rigid academic standards used as shields against criticism. A proud conformism. No wonder “innovation” gets crushed, the whole system selects for obedience wrapped in polish.
A rare, substantial question came from the audience: someone brought actual data about the growth of “woke” discourse. Where does the pressure come from, upstream (ideology, power) or downstream (social media)? The dominant theme, the lowest common denominator thinking. A retreat from ambition under the guise of “maximum inclusivity.”
One speaker touched briefly on humanism, the idea of creating knowledge for the public good. But it was an aside, quickly buried under the usual careerist rhetoric. Again and again, they insisted they had no ideology. But the dominant ideology was everywhere: jobs, prestige, status.
The whole event kept circling one unspoken truth: things are breaking down, but instead of grappling with that rupture, they reinterpreted it as nostalgia or bureaucratic failure or “wokeness gone too far.” Because the system they’re defending, consciously or not, no longer works for most of us, these guys are uninterested in composting the mess.
These guys’ waste time, lives and distract focus, lifting the lid, a mess, maybe their narrow point of view has some value sometimes, but I did not see it at then event or in the groups’ history #frendlyenemies#spoilers#energyvampires#deathcult
A reminder: treating everything as a personal conflict is unbelievably stupid. It’s one of the most damaging habits we’ve normalized in our pushing of #stupidindividualism, and a core pillar of the #mainstreaming that keeps us in loops of division, burnout, and reaction. We’ve seen this time and again – online, offline, in activist circles, and tech spaces. People isolate, bicker, and collapse movements rather than build collectives.
So how do we get out of this trap?
Rebuild Collective Thinking
We need to shift from “me” to “we.” This doesn’t mean erasing individual voices, it means weaving them into shared goals. The #openweb thrives when people collaborate on process, not just identity or ideology. It’s about creating space for disagreement without turning it into warfare. Focus on shared outcomes, not personal ego.
Normalize Conflict Mediation, Not Escalation
Disagreement is natural. But instead of defaulting to callouts, blocks, and walkouts, let’s revive the art of mediation. Real communities have friction, but they also have tools to work through it. Bring your shovel, not your flamethrower. Compost the crap; don’t fling it.
Prioritize Process over Personalities
Movements rot when they’re built around individuals, especially charismatic ones. Codebases, collectives, and federated systems need open, documented processes that anyone can step into. People come and go, but if the path is solid, the work continues. That’s what the #4opens is about, building resilience through transparency and collaboration.
Build Human-Scale Structures
We need networks that encourage local accountability and global connection, not scale for the sake of attention. Small communities federated together are harder to corrupt, easier to moderate, and better for mental health. Scale by trust, not by metrics.
Practice Default-to-Good-Faith Culture
Trust isn’t blind, but suspicion as a baseline poisons everything. We need to make “assume good faith” a default again, until proven otherwise. Not everyone is a grifter, an op, or a narcissist. Most are just trying to find their footing, like you. Let’s stop tearing each other down on impulse.
If we can move from personal grievance to collective purpose, from reactivity to reflection, from individual branding to shared building, then maybe we can finally break from the current loop. It’s not about being perfect, it’s about being in “process” together.
Let’s stop adding to the mess and start composting it, please.
To put this into a social path, scaling is a double-edged sword – it can be both good and bad, depending on how it’s done.
Good, because when things scale well, people don’t have to worry, systems run smoothly, communities thrive, and services become accessible.
Bad, because the strength of a healthy network lies in staying small-scale, transparent, and human. The moment something becomes too big, it starts to lose the relational dynamics that gave it value in the first place.
So, how do we balance this? The idea is that codebases and networks need to scale just enough, not infinitely, but to the point where they can support a human-scale community. After that point, it’s not only acceptable but preferable if they start to strain or fail under pressure. That friction is a feature, not a bug, it nudges people to move to federate rather than stay and centralize.
What does “enough” mean? “Enough” isn’t a fixed number, but a pattern, a community of a few hundred to a few thousand accounts. Of these, perhaps 15–25% are very active, contributing most of the content, moderation, and tagging. This scale is large enough for rich conversation and diverse activity, but still small enough for shared context and trust, low moderation overhead, organic relationships and accountability. Once a community grows beyond this range, organic moderation and social cohesion break down, leading to noise, exploitation, or the #mainstreaming call for reliance on impersonal algorithmic solutions, the very things OMN path wants to avoid.
Federation is the healthy scaling path we need to take. Rather than “scaling up” in a single, monolithic instance, the sustainable way is to scale, is out through federation. That is, build many interconnected human-scale communities, each managing itself. Using shared protocols, metadata flows, and trust tagging to connect communities meaningfully. Respect local autonomy, while allowing content, trust, and culture to flow between nodes. This model mirrors healthy ecosystems, small habitats working together rather than being swallowed by a single “concrete” system.
Why this matters for #FOSS codebases? Software should be designed to reflect and reinforce this human-scale path. Keeping systems lightweight and maintainable for small teams, to enable interoperability and modular design, so communities can fork, adapt, or remix code to suit local needs. It’s core to this path to accept that codebases don’t need to scale infinitely, they only need to scale enough to support the next healthy layer of federation.
The right question isn’t “Can this scale to millions?” but “Can this be easily cloned, modified, and federated by others?” By embracing “ENOUGH” as a limit and a guide, we ensure our networks stay rooted in trust, flexible in form, and resilient by design. Growth becomes a matter of spreading seeds, not building towers.
The last 20 years of tech governance projects keep missing the mark because they refuse to engage with the real, lived experiences of grassroots activists and community builders. Instead of listening, they fall back into the comfort zones of the #geekproblem: control over collaboration, certainty over-curiosity, code over community.
This is further compounded by the “professional” #NGO class of detached, branding-obsessed, and career-driven #mainstreaming. They claim to serve communities but remain disconnected from the daily struggles, uncertainty, and messiness that define grassroots organizing. These people aren’t building relationships; they’re building resumes.
If they could stop and actually listen to those of us who’ve been in the trenches, those who’ve composted decades of failures and seeded collective wins, they’d quickly see the futility of their rigid, technocratic paths. Real governance isn’t found in plush committee rooms or geeky blockchains. It always emerges from shared struggle, radical trust, and the mess of collaboration.
Until tech governance initiatives shift focus, from control to cooperation, from professional advancement to collective empowerment, they will continue to fail. Worse, they will undermine the communities they claim to support. And let’s be honest, it’s well past time to compost the last ten years of #encryptionist fantasy-making as a first step.
The #OGB (Open Governance Body) was created as a response to this mess making. Rooted in the #4opens principles, it challenges the false promises of #blockchain and #DAOs, which replicate the worst aspects of capitalist market logic, financialization, scarcity, and the concentration of power. Tokens and ledgers are not the future of grassroots governance, they’re its co-option.
We need to actively resist these technological distractions because we know that community is not code. And governance is not a smart contract. We need grassroots paths that reflect gift economies, mutual aid, and social trust, not digital casinos. The truth is that still too many #mainstreaming#NGO types are more interested in branding their codebases and instances than actually serving the messy, vibrant, collective reality of the #openweb as it exists.
That’s why we need the #OMN (Open Media Network). Because governance, media, and tech are not separate, they’re bound together. The #OMN path is about rooting our tools in real communities, building trust over time, and composting the failed hype cycles of the last decade.
If we want an #openweb that matters, we have to dig deeper. Start local. Share power. And stay messy.
Let’s get the shit-shoveling out of the way first. People get twitchy about the word Communism, waving their arms about “utopian” back-to-the-land communes or religious cults that gave up on society and ran off into the woods, on one side and on the other expansionist empires. That’s not what we’re talking about. Those were retreats, both dead ends. They didn’t believe the world can change, so they isolated themselves and built closed states in the shadows of the #deathcult empire we to often live in. That’s not compost, that’s too often decay.
What I would mean by Communism is radically simple: a society based on practical equality. That means everyone has what they need, and nobody gets to hoard. It’s not abstract, it’s built on what people can do and what they really need, no more and no less.
And this grows out of a basic truth, humans are social creatures. We exist inside society, not apart from it. So any real ethics, any workable economics, has to start there. The individual is not some walled-off unit of value, that’s the poison the #deathcult worships. And under the current system, that poison is poured into everything. It’s why we get so much waste, so much suffering, and why inequality isn’t a glitch, it’s the damn #mainstreaming path.
So let’s be honest. There are only two ways to organize society: Slavery or Equality. Everything else is a mask. What we’ve got now is, for most people, the latest version of slavery – Wage Labour – which is just chattel slavery with the branding updated, and the chains made invisible. The #nastyfew ruling class, the “worthy”, decide what’s valuable and over the long term try and squeeze the rest of us dry. These self-declared “useful” people are entirely parasitic. The only productive class is the one they exploit: the workers, the creators, the growers. The rest are just shuffling paper and shifting blame, smoke and mirrors.
Every age has dressed this up differently. Rome had chains. Feudalism had serfs. Now we have debt, wages, and endless hustle. Same shit, different form. But the composting truth, we’ve arrived at a point in history where this can break down. The system that enslaved us has finally created the possibility of liberation. That’s the dialectic, out of the rot, we can grow something living.
Communism does not need to be a dream – it can be a practical toolkit for that growth. It says:
From each according to their capacity, to each according to their need.
And when they ask, “But how will you measure someone’s need?” we answer, in a real society, people grow up inside a culture of mutual care. You stop thinking in terms of what you can grab and start thinking in terms of what you can share. The culture composts greed. The idea of stepping on someone else to get ahead just doesn’t make sense anymore.
You want doctors? You make space for people who want to heal, not for those who want a title and a paycheck. The community will support their learning because everyone benefits. A fake doctor who slides through on bullshit credentials won’t last long in a society that knows what real care looks like. The mask won’t work anymore.
Yes, we’ll still need to deal with logistics, conflict, even assholes, “communism” isn’t heaven, it’s just a #KISS honest way to live. And it can maybe handle everything the current system handles, only better. Capitalism is a hack job, it hoards, it wastes, it burns people out. A communal society builds real wealth: time, beauty, knowledge, unpolluted air, clean water, and space to actually live.
And how do we get there? Not by magic. Not by seizing the TV stations and declaring victory. The revolution is already underway. But it’s compost, not dynamite. We’re building a soil layer thick enough for life to grow.
It starts by making more communists, by spreading the seed idea, that equality isn’t just desirable, it’s necessary. It grows when workers demand not just crumbs but real power, not reforms, but transformation. First they fight for better pay, then for control, and finally they realize the masters have no magic, no divine right – just theft, backed by violence and lies.
The change won’t come as a single event. It’s a long decay and regrowth – a shift from brittle control to living interdependence. The capitalist state will still try to crush this change when the time comes, but by then, it could be too late. Its legitimacy will have rotted away. People will already be walking, building the alternative paths.
In short:
I could be a Communist because the current system is slavery with marketing.
I could be a Communist because I believe in people, not profit.
I could be a Communist because the future can be communal, or there will be no future.
#Neoliberalism isn’t just an economic system, it’s a cult of self-enclosure. Its superpower? #stupidindividualism, turning people inward, away from shared life, into isolated fragments clicking, swiping, and scrolling through ruins. It disconnects us from collective being, and then sells the pieces back as “individual freedoms.” This isn’t an accident. It’s the plan, a trick of enclosure, take a concept of civic breakdown and turn it into a moral failing of the person, not the system. A classic #deathcult move.
Let’s call it what it is #stupidindividualism = the neoliberal condition of enclosure. A social operating system designed to lock us into self-referential survival while the commons burn.
We’ve all been forced into #stupidindividualism. The #dotcons enclose our attention. The gig economy encloses our labour. Even our friendships are enclosed in “encrypted” DMs, monetized by adtech. Public life? Gone, auctioned off to the highest bidder or locked behind paywalls.
We are encouraged to be good “idiots” in the ancient Greek sense – disengaged from collective power. This #deathcult under capitalism, is a feature, not a bug. They, the #nastyfew want “us” atomized, docile, and scrolling, not stepping away from the path to new norms. And so we rot in a swamp of aestheticized politics – “likes” over lives, vibes over values, empty radical branding over messy collective struggle.
Some symptoms of this sickness can be seen in commons destroyed: Libraries gutted, parks sold off, hospitals privatized. Nothing left to meet in. Social life enclosed: From Facebook groups to “creator economies,” all relations are branded and transactional. Fear replaces solidarity, precarity rewires our brains – everyone a competitor, every community a threat. Politics becomes content, no spaces for deliberation, only comment sections and algorithmic outrage. Under this path, “engagement” is a metric, not a practice. #stupidindividualism is the “normal” common sense path we currently walk down.
The left hasn’t escaped. We’re not immune. We’re infected. Too much of what passes for radicalism is just #stupidindividualism with better fonts. Buzzwords. Identity consumption. Internal drama cycles. Empty memes. Most leftist language itself has been enclosed into performative radicalism, saying the right things in the right tone to the right audience – but nothing changes. It’s a ritual, not resistance. Aesthetic replaces action: Solidarity becomes merch. Mutual aid becomes charity. “Revolution” becomes content marketing.
This is all the “common sense” #mainstreaming by another name. It’s simply #stupidindividualism on the left. And we can’t win if we keep playing by the #deathcult’s dogma. So how do we compost this? We grow living language from real ground. No more floating hashtags. No more semantic bubbles. Here’s the path, embed language in practice, political terms should come from mutual aid kitchens, picket lines, and assemblies – not Slack threads or Twitter feuds.
Don’t just “speak truth to power” – speak truth to each other, if we want to build a better world, we need collective life again. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s survival. We’re in a fight against a system that thrives on isolation. #Neoliberalism has turned us all into (stupid)individuals, and then blamed us for it.
Let’s be clear, the opposite of #stupidindividualism is not intellect, it’s interdependence. So let’s plant words in soil again. Let’s grow meaning from shared struggle. Let’s compost the #deathcult and sprout something real. On this path, just say no to self-enclosure. No to semantic drift. No to aesthetic radicals trapped in content loops. Instead, let’s get our hands dirty.
We used to run 6 #Fediverse instances as part of the #OMN project – thousands of users across them. Admin/mod work was done by volunteers, grounded in user reports, contextual judgment, and dialogue. No hard rules. Just common sense and solidarity. It worked for 4–5 years.
Then came the #Twitter liberal influx – intolerant, entitled, and completely disconnected from #mutualaid and community care. They treated our volunteer-run platforms as if they were corporate #dotcons, shouting into the void and demanding services with no reciprocity.
We tried to bridge the gap, repeatedly. It didn’t work. It drained us. After a year running at a huge loss, we had to shut them all down. Yes, it’s sad. Yes, it’s bad. But this is a normal pattern, resources are disposed of, culture gets flattened, energy gets burned out.
Alt-tech needs some resources, yes, far less than the #mainstreaming, but not zero. More importantly, it needs a culture that doesn’t throw itself under the wheels of liberal exceptionalism. We’re now working on rebooting this, with code that’s less friendly to “common sense” liberalism and more in tune with grassroots #4opens values.
Because, let’s face it, look at most tech news today and mutter with me:
Utterly pointless. Stupidly pointless. Dangerously pointless.
Naively evil. Innocently evil. Just plain evil.
…We need to do better in alt-tech.
The #dotcons built billion-dollar platforms on amplifying the worst of human nature. It’s long past time to return to the #openweb, and compost this mess making.
The opening moment of the workshop on Methodological Strategies for Real-Life Theorising was unintentionally profound. A story of a seagull crieing above the glass façade of the Blavatnik School of Government – a building that stands as a temple to the #deathcult that shaped our lives for the last 40 years of #neoliberal change. In hindsight, that seagull metaphor may have been the wisest participant at the event.
The sessions that followed offered a painful reminder of just how entrenched and constipated academic political theory can be. Many of the speakers, well-meaning, no doubt, spoke in dense, self-referential language, seemingly unaware (or uninterested) in the world burning outside. We are living through accelerating #climatechaos, surging right-wing extremism, and widespread social fragmentation. Yet here, the main concern is career-building through opaque frameworks and method fetishism. One can’t help but wonder how many in the room truly believe they are doing good?
The crisis is deeper than any single workshop. The very career paths that brought these scholars here have been shaped, filtered, and “concreted” by 30 years of neoliberal funding models. The result is a form of political theorising that appears to want to find a way out, but only by squeezing itself through the tightest gaps in the #postmodern mess. And even then, only while clutching tightly to the privileges and assumptions granted by the current paths.
Constipated Language, Abstract Struggles
Throughout the first sessions, there was a recurring sense of people talking to themselves. Even the attempts to make theory “concrete” – to move into empirical territory – felt more like power grabs than inquiry. There was talk of “transient theory,” of “mid-level normative frameworks,” of “ethnographic insights”, but very little clarity on what any of this meant in real practical or political terms.
Instead of confronting the deeply ideological assumptions embedded in liberal academia, the speakers soft-stepped around them. One could sense them trying to smuggle ideology back into a discipline that’s been left hollow. The “heroic era of theory” is dead, and what we’re left with is a ritual performance of relevance. At one point, the liberal impulse to block discomforting inputs in public policy was laid bare. This is ethics as insulation, not action. There was repeated deference to “existing norms and frameworks,” – the very architecture of the #deathcult, now warmed up and served again as policy advice.
The Seagull Still Watches
By the end of the day, some fresh air drifted in. A few scraps of cloth were handed out to the otherwise naked theorists. There was genuine engagement with normative complexity. Questions like “what is mutable?” began to shift the conversation. “Engaged political philosophy” and talk of “normative judgments” began to inch the discussion closer to the ground.
The presentation on restitution, for instance, highlighted real political dilemmas. Who decides what gets returned, and why? Is it justice, diplomacy, or geo-political calculation? One question noted that giving back looted objects is not just about ethics, it’s about giving back the values they represent. But this was quickly hedged with talk of “choice.” Liberal hedging again. No one wanted to say: yes, do it, without compromise.
Even here, markets remained the baseline. The dominant “common sense” is still economic flow. Value is defined by trade, not meaning. Discrimination itself can to easily be reframed as a market distortion, another cost to be corrected, not a systemic condition to be fought. The anti-market perspective, grounded in actual social justice, in living memory, in reparative truth, is invisible to meany people until it becomes a threat. At that point, the strategy shifts to distraction and buying off. That’s the logic of #neoliberal containment.
From Political Theory to Political Theater
What we witnessed was not just a methodological workshop, but a staged performance of institutional survival. Theories were dressed up, displayed, but never walked out into the street. Real political agency remained absent. The political philosopher, once imagined as a public actor, now hides behind peer-reviewed paywalls, while the world asks different questions entirely.
Still, by the end, perhaps there were reasons for the seagull to hold off its stone throwing – for a while. A few voices showed signs of life. A few questions struck true. But it will take more than scraps of normative cloth to cover the nakedness of political philosophy today.
The event: Many political philosophers theorise not only for the sake of pure theory, but also because they want to convince citizens and policymakers to bring about changes in the real world.
Such policy-oriented research often draws on interdisciplinary methods, integrating empirical insights and normative and conceptual arguments. This, however, raises methodological challenges of its own. For example, how to deal with the fact that the social sciences are fragmented and different disciplines work with different paradigms and methodologies? How can philosophers, who bring their own normative assumptions openly to the table, deal with the – sometimes implicit – normativity that is also inherent in many other lines of research? What level of abstraction of normative arguments, eg basic normative theories or mid-level overlapping principles, should philosophers draw on when discussing with policymakers? And how to deal with the fact that in the current political climate in many countries, distrust towards “experts” also extends to philosophers? Workshop agenda
Day 1: Thursday 24 April 2025
Methodological Strategies for real-life theorising
Chair: Jonathan Wolff, Blavatinik School of Government
Liron Lavi, Bar-Ilan University and Nahshon Perez, Bar-Ilan University: Conceptual Concretization in Empirically Informed Political Theory: What Makes a Concept Applicable
Carmen E Pavel, King’s College London: Mid-Level Theories of Justice and Public Policy
Kian Mintz Woo, University College, Cork: Explicit Methodologies for Normative Evaluation in Public Policy
Theorising between values and cases
Chair: Daniel Halliday, University of Melbourne
Rouven Symank, Free University, Berlin: Integrating Ethnography with Political Theory in Policy-Oriented Research: Challenges and Insights from Cultural Restitution Debates
Florence Adams, University of Cambridge: Discrimination as an Object of Social Science
Erika Brandl, University of Bergen: Measuring the justice of architectural development policies:debates on temporal scopes and indicators in the Hillevåg plan
My notes on this event:
The seagull is perhaps a good metaphor for nature fighting back against the last 40 years of human #deathcult culture that this building is temple of.
The language is constipated, a growing feeling that these people are pissing funding and focus against the wall while the world burns from #climatechaos and hard right social breakdown.
I wonder how many people here think they are doing good?
The problem on this career path is that it has been shaped by #neoliberalism for the last 20 years, funding and status have both been ground through this mess, and now reflect it.
After the first session I feel they are trying to squeeze themself out of this post modernist mess. By going back to basics, but it’s so constipated it’s hard to see if there is any value in this.
Looking at them talk and answer questions, you can feel them being lost. It still feels like they are talking to themselves.
A power grab, by making theory concrete, to build empirical research. They dodge this by saying the theory is transient.
If this is a bios? They fix this by making the bios visible. They find this question hard to answer as its a root issue.
They are “soft” sneaking ideology back into the current dead Political Science and theory world they work in.
The heroic era of theory is challenged for making public policy. They argue that we should start from the existing norms and frameworks. This from the #deathcult we get wormed up #deathcult worship as policy. Mess. Of course liberal rights have priority in the end, “we must also include institutional facts”.
The seagulls at the start of this event might be the wisest one here. The rest have no cloths, and the language is so constipated that the smell is likely off putting for any real outreach that they need in the scrabbling for coverings to continue their careers.
The liberals start to talk about #blocking the inputs that make them uncomfortable. In ethical public policy making.
From a working insider view, the people doing this don’t have the skills or knowledge if we focus on philosophy and theory only.
Good question, what is given, what is mutable is very mutable. So the Liberal “common sense” is likely a strong #blocking on the path of the change we need.
“Engaged political philosophy” “normative judgments” as we go on they start to be more relevant. “where there is convergence and divergence”
The event starts naked and smelly but as it goes on the air clears at times and some scraps of cloth are provided.
Relevant information that is easily excessable,
The power in a committee is the appointment of the people sitting on the committee rather than the committee process it self. The answer to this is hesitant and bluff, and distaste to cover this.
A chair or witness roll is different in committees.
Why restitution, why now.
Liberal Justice
Reperatition is politics, not just ethical, geo politics and funding, based on former colonist will, is a tool for “ethical diplomacy”
Can any of these be seen as a reason not to do it. Don’t have an answer. Normative lessons.
When we give back objects that we value from our looting, we are giving back our values. We still chose.
My parents work is displayed in our #mainstreaming institutions, but these institutions are not interested in the objects, as they do not fit into there existing story’s and category. Subject archives will take them. But this is still shaping history.
Markets as the dominant “common sense” everything is economic flows. Value is defined by this.
Discrimination is contested with the hard shift to the right #DUI
Distortion in the market, function efficiently.
Discrimination is about greed, American greed, a moral dilemma. Liberal but not to liberal. Talk about the market path, let the market do its thing.
Markets aligned characteristics, money the logic of the #deathcult
As my work is anti market they can’t see any value, so put no resources and focus on the path in till it becomes a threat then distraction and buying off become the difficult paths.
Trump now is turning this neoliberalism around as discrimination. What is this, discrimination against nation states, rather than economics/market.
At the end the might be reasons for the seagull to hold off the stone throwing for a while.
