In the traditional media and our social reflection of this – “Belief in markets”, is theological thinking disguised as economics. The market is a god, and economists its priesthood. Modern economic discourse treats “the Market” as: omniscient (“the market knows best”), omnipotent (“there is no alternative”), morally authoritative (“price signals reveal truth”), beyond democratic challenge (“don’t interfere, or you’ll anger it”)
It should be easy to understand this isn’t analysis, it’s faith. When something goes wrong, the response isn’t accountability, it’s ritual: austerity, deregulation, labour discipline, “tightening belts”. This working class suffering becomes a necessary sacrifice to restore god’s favor. That’s why at the #OMN we called it the #deathcult – normal people are expected to suffer and die, quietly, so the economic system can live.
Priests, temples, and worshippers, religions have hierarchy, in this mainstream one: Central bankers are high priests, rating agencies are oracles, think tanks are seminaries, media pundits are evangelists, platforms are temples, metrics are scripture. It’s all theological thinking all the way down, surface disguised as economics
The closer you are to god (capital, liquidity, investment flows), the more authority you’re granted. Those far away – workers, communities, the climate – are treated as abstractions, “externalities”. And, like all priesthoods, our elitists claim neutrality while enforcing doctrine.
Heresy is not allowed, questioning the market is treated at best as: naive, dangerous, emotional, “anti-growth”, “anti-business”, “unrealistic”. This mirrors religious heresy exactly. Then we have the last 40 years of #posttruth, once belief replaces evidence, language becomes performative, words are used to signal loyalty, not to describe reality.
This matters for the #openweb and #OMN as the current path, the #dotcons are the digital expression of this religion, encoding market theology into infrastructure with engagement replaces meaning, growth replaces health, metrics replace judgment, extraction replaces relationship. This is why reform inside platforms fails, you’re not tweaking a tool, you’re challenging a faith system.
The #openweb threatens this religion because it decentralises authority, reintroduces human judgment, values trust over metrics, treats technology as means, not destiny. That’s apostasy and why “fairer worship” isn’t liberation, it’s at most progressive #mainstreaming that wants more inclusive access to the temple, fairer distribution of sacrifices, representation among the priests. That has real short-term value, yes, but it never questions the altar itself.
The #OMN position is different, it focused on stand up, walking out, building something else. So what would a post-religious economics look like? Signal thinking, not worship, markets as tools, not gods, economics as a social science, not divine law. Values decided democratically, not revealed by price. Survival and care as nonnegotiable, growth as optional, not sacred. This aligns directly with our insistence on balancing social value and personal value.
This framing cuts through the mess, calling it religion, we break the spell. People can see faith masquerading as fact, priests masquerading as experts, sacrifice masquerading as necessity, they can no longer pretend this is “just how the world works”. That’s why this language, hashtag story matters. It’s not rhetorical excess – it’s diagnosis. And diagnosis is the first step to composting the #deathcult and planting something that can actually keep people alive.
Most mainstream journalism is not about public truth, it’s about platform survival. This shite pile is why almost everything is noise, what gets called “news” today, when It’s not straight up propaganda is shaped by: attention metrics, outrage cycles, advertiser safety, institutional access, career risk management.
That’s why it feels so empty, even when it’s “factually” correct. The framing is already captured, journalism inside the logic of the #deathcult, wearing progressive, neutral, or technocratic costumes. So yes: most #mainstreaming news is noise, not because it’s all fake, but because it is: structurally irrelevant to challenge lived power, allergic to root causes, incapable of imagining alternatives, It’s mess because it job is to explain the world in ways that prevent change.
Signal vs noise is a useful distinction, signal isn’t “better facts” its orientation. Noise at best tells you a narrow view of what happened today, who said what in this narrow view, which team is winning in this view, how to feel about this. Signal doesn’t chase this novelty, it tracks patterns, power, and consequence.
What would “signal journalism” actually look like? Practically and philosophically, signal journalism would start from social need, not market demand, not “what will people click?” but “what do people need to know to act together?” Signal helps you understand, why things keep happening, who benefits structurally, what capacities are being destroyed or built, where collective agency still exists.
It’s thus explicitly about power, not pretending neutrality where none exists, rather about who is protected and who is exposed. It doesn’t confuse balance with truth, it treats people as participants, not audiences
Traditional media and #dotcons journalism assumes: speaker → audience → consumption.
Signal journalism assumes: participants → shared inquiry → shared action.
Today, too much journalism is caught in this trap. Precarious journalists + algorithmic discipline = fear-driven reporting. When private greed meets public need, this is the path of corruption. Working journalism is supposed to be: a public good, a memory system, a mediation layer for democracy. But the current mess is optimized for: extraction, surveillance, behavioural control, brand safety. So even “good” journalism becomes structurally conservative. This is why reform inside the same platforms fails.
This is where projects like the #OMN matters: shared media, shared process, shared memory. “The capitalism of digital platforms makes labour discipline more rigid… subordinate and precarious at the same time.” The constant “now now now” is a discipline mechanism, its fake urgency.
Signal journalism asks:
what is structurally urgent?
what is manufactured urgency?
what requires patience and continuity?
Why this is an #OMN problem (and opportunity). The OMN was never about “better content”, it is about changing the conditions under which content exists. This is signal journalism: federated publishing, shared archives, transparent process, local grounding, slow trust-building. In other words: social infrastructure first, content second.
On this path #Indymedia worked not because it was perfect, but because it was situated, collective, and accountable to real communities, not metrics.
The hard part – Signal is harder than noise because: it doesn’t flatter identities, it doesn’t reward instant reaction, it often feels boring at first, it requires shared effort over time. Where noise feels alive… If we want journalism that matters, we have to build the soil it can grow in. That’s the #OMN path: less spectacle, more process, less worship, more walking out of the temple.
Most progressive #mainstreaming isn’t about ending the #deathcult – it’s about making its worship feel more fair, more inclusive, more polite. There is some real everyday value in this. Fewer people get crushed immediately, some suffering is reduced, that matters.
But let’s be honest about what it does not do, it does not get people off their knees to challenge the altar to stop the sacrifice. It rearranges the seating in the temple, feeding the deeper problem, obedience. Progressive mainstreaming accepts the frame, accepts the metrics, accepts the economy of extraction and then argues about distribution. It negotiates better terms with a machine that is killing us. That is not transformation, it’s managed decline.
The project of real change and challenge – the work the #OMN exists for – starts somewhere else entirely. It starts with people standing up and walking away. Walking out of the temple of the #deathcult we all live in, not in purity, utopia or comfort. But into mess, cooperation, unfinished tools, shared risk, and actual agency. This isn’t about better policies inside the system. It’s about building outside it, under it, alongside it – until the system hollowed itself out and no longer matters.
It’s about people picking up shovels, composting the wreckage, and growing something that can actually sustain life. This is simplicity #KISS#OMN
We have already seen the failures: lived through #Indymedia, the #NGO turn, the #dotcons capture, the #Fediverse repeating old mistakes. When we talk about #OMN, we’re trying to stop people from re-learning the same lessons by losing again. Silence would be complicity.
The #OMN is where critique becomes agency. It’s not about “promoting a project”, if we don’t talk about this without something like #OMN, critique collapses into doom, aesthetics, or personal exits. #OMN is a way to, act collectively, without lying about power, money, or governance.
Forgetting is how capture happens, the moment people stop naming alternatives, the space fills with managerial language, funding logic, and fear-based control. We talk about #OMN to keep the space open enough for something human to grow.
The #OMN is a path that resists #stupidindividualism, where most contemporary “solutions” reinforce isolation, personal brands, and individual safety strategies. #OMN starts from the assumption that survival and meaning are collective. We need to keep talking about this because almost nobody else does.
It’s unfinished – and that matters. It’s not about defending a polished system, instead, it’s about holding open a process. Talking about #OMN is how we invite others into the compost rather than presenting them with a finished product to consume.
We talk about #OMN because it’s a native way of saying: “We don’t have to repeat this. We can build differently, together, if we remember what already worked.”*
It’s not evangelism, it’s stewardship.
A few of us have been working on real, positive, horizontal social and technological solutions for over twenty years. Not hypotheticals, not vibes, things that actually work.
We know they work locally, we know they work socially. And after more than a decade building on the #fediverse, we know they can work in tech, at scale without going vertical, corporate, or authoritarian.
This isn’t speculative any more. Our creative task now – the #nothingnew work – is simply to combine what already works: Horizontal social practice, federated #openweb tech, trust-based governance. We already have a slate of projects waiting to be built: #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback and #makinghistory. What’s missing is not ideas, it is people willing to show up and implement.
And here’s the hard truth: every time we try to talk about radical or progressive language, power, or structure, people retreat into #blocking and ignoring. The same unresolved tensions get replayed endlessly, nothing is mediated, nothing is grounded. Bad will accumulates, the social commons rots.
This rot isn’t accidental – it’s structural – To work our way out of this mess, we need both #fluff and #spiky. We need broad categories to think clearly, the #mainstreaming#fashernista rejection of this isn’t sophistication – it’s submission. It’s a soft, polite form of #deathcult worship.
You don’t dismantle a #deathcult by being nicer to it, you dismantle it by stopping your participation and building something better.
So this is the question, not rhetorical, not theoretical: Are you going to help make this happen? Are you going to pick up a shovel? Or are you going to stay on your knees, arguing about tone while the ground burns?
There is such a thing as society. The entire #openweb is built on that assumption 🙂 Deny it, and everything collapses into noise, power grabs, and enclosure. That denial, dressed up today as “post-truth” – is killing us.
Our current media ecology is broken. So called #AI and Google are no longer a useful way to find information about most things that actually matter. This isn’t accidental; it’s a structural #dotcons problem. Extraction, advertising, and algorithmic manipulation have replaced human discovery, context, and trust.
The same sickness runs through much of today’s open-source and free software world. Its governance models are still rooted in medieval political ideas: aristocrats, benevolent dictators, kings and courts. That might have muddled through in the 20th century, but it is obviously useless for the world we now live in.
The last twenty years trying to mediate this with neoliberal #stupidindividualism has only made things worse. The result is towering piles of steaming #techshit, endlessly churned, rarely useful, and increasingly disconnected from any healthy social reality. This is the #geekproblem made in: code, silicon and concrete.
The #mainstreaming disaster driven by #dotcons is obvious. We don’t need to relitigate it every five minutes. For motivation and clarity, let’s put them to one side and focus on what we can actually change. Our own tech culture is still hopelessly mired in the #geekproblem. So yes, we need to compost a lot of our own mess.
The path out of both the #closedweb and the geek cul-de-sac is not new. It’s old, boring, and powerful: trust, shared responsibility, and human-scale democracy. If we are serious, the #openweb has to be rebooted with grassroots democracy at its core. Social tech needs social governance. Without that, we are just recreating vertical power with nicer licences.
This is where #OGB (Open Governance Bodies) matter. With real democratic process, it becomes relatively simple to push the #dotcons back out of spaces they currently dominate by default. Without democracy, they will always win, not because they are smarter, but because they are organised.
Right now, we are drowning in the #mainstreaming mess. And worse, we are still adding to it. Every pointless project, every ego-driven fork, every governance-free platform accelerates #techchurn and deepens the rot. We need to stop pretending this is neutral.
Yes, “open standards” are a mess, always have been, but they are the mess we must build on until enough of the #openweb is rebooted – including democratic decision-making – to rejuvenate and civilise the standards bodies themselves. Strong democracy changes the game. With it, enclosure becomes contestable. Without it, we just get louder arguments and faster failure.
And when people doing obviously stupid things can’t understand what the #OMN hashtags mean? Click the hashtags and think, or stand and shout, then hit the block button. You get to choose 🙂 This is not rudeness, it’s focus. And focus is how we stop adding to the mess and start composting it into something that might actually grow.
In my life, what is real is people being beaten and shot, blood on the walls, evidence fabricated, mass arrests, torture in prisons, borders closing, and fear becoming an everyday condition. Fear isn’t imagined. Fear is rational.
What is real is watching a police officer chat casually one moment, then flip instantly into an instrument of state violence the next. A human being turns into a mechanism: boots stamping, braking toes, batons smashing heads, cameras destroyed, people dragged away. Hundreds detained illegally. This isn’t abstract. This is lived experience.
This is what power looks like when legitimacy erodes. And this is not new. History is full of these moments – when states retreat from consent and rely instead on force, surveillance, and spectacle. When violence becomes administrative, repression is normalized and denial becomes #mainstreaming policy.
What is not real is pretending that this violence is secondary to discomfort over language. What is not real is prioritising hurt feelings, tone-policing, or abstract arguments about phrasing. What is not real is treating “uncomfortable language” as a greater harm than broken bones, smashed lives, and stolen futures. There is a profound mismatch here.
People are upset about words because words feel manageable. Words can be moderated, reported, debated. State violence cannot. It is harder to face. It demands courage, solidarity, and risk. So attention is redirected, from material harm to symbolic offence. This is how reality gets inverted, this is too much of the mess of the last ten years.
Talking outside someone’s direct experience is not violence. Naming systems of power is not oppression. Describing brutality is not the problem, the problem is the brutality itself. When repression becomes normal, discomfort becomes a distraction. It’s a luxury concern in a world where people are being beaten, imprisoned, and erased. Policing language while ignoring violence is not moral clarity, it’s moral collapse.
If we cannot distinguish between discomfort and domination, between harsh words and broken bodies, then we have already lost our grounding in reality. What is real is violence backed by the state. Everything else is noise, no matter how it makes you “feel.”
Yep, it’s a mess, that needs mediating for any outcome other than more mess to compost.
#mainstreaming people are wilfully blind and alt people tend to be pessimistic, it’s a problem. Historically, real social change doesn’t arrive by waiting for collapse. It arrives because people are active, they build alternatives in advance, strong enough to bridge the mess when existing systems fail and lose legitimacy. This isn’t theory. It’s how change has always happened.
If you are interested in a better outcome, we need to remember, build first, collapse later is the lesson that we keep forgetting. You don’t wait for the crash, you prepare, are ready to catch people when it comes.
Projects like the #OMN are currently blocked because capitalism, especially after forty years of neoliberalism, has poisoned our idea of individualism. We’re trained to see ourselves as isolated actors rather than members of a society capable of collective care and collective power. This keeps us passive while the systems hollow out around us.
One of the biggest blocks to change is the belief that politics is something done to us, rather than by us. People blame politicians for everything – climate breakdown, cultural decay, economic precarity – while avoiding responsibility for the systems we participate in daily.
In the working alt paths, we build parallel systems to make change happen. Revolutions don’t begin with a dramatic break. They begin quietly, when people redirect time, energy, trust, and care into structures that actually work. Gradually, those structures grow. Eventually, the old ones hollow out and lose relevance.
But we are society. It starts and ends with us. Learning how to help your neighbours now – feeding people, housing people, sharing skills, organising locally – isn’t charity. It’s practice. It builds the muscles, myths, and traditions we’ll need when systems fail harder than they already are. And they will fail. The only uncertainty is how badly.
This can start anywhere – including with shared tech infrastructure like the #OMN. You don’t need permission, mass consensus. You, simply, need commitment, continuity, and care.
Over the last decade, #techchurn has produced mountains of #techshit. Both mainstream and “alternative” tech piles need composting if we want to grow a more humane world. From a grassroots perspective, many past alternatives – anarchist, ecological, socialist – did work imperfectly, until they were eaten, flattened, or professionalised by #NGO, #fashernista, and #deathcult dynamics.
Stepping away from the tech mess means composting it. It’s good that people try not to push pointless tech projects. And let’s be honest: most new tech projects are pointless. In the era of #climatechaos, we don’t have the luxury of pretending otherwise.
That’s already happening, unevenly and messily, especially across the #Fediverse. The real question isn’t whether parallel systems will emerge. The question is whether the balance will be humane, democratic, and resilient, or authoritarian and exclusionary.
To figure out what’s worth building, we need to do #4opens reviews and publish them. This isn’t gatekeeping – it’s collective responsibility. Let’s build a shared culture of useful tech, together. The task now is to reboot what worked, using federated #4opens tech, and then innovate forward from there. This is where #OMN and #indymediaback sit: not nostalgia, but composted continuity.
In the era of #climatechaos, too many people are on their knees worshipping the #deathcult. We need to call pointless things pointless – clearly, calmly, without fear. If that idea scares you, ask why. Fear is how obedience is maintained. #fashernistas, get off your knees. Use the #4opens as a shovel. There are piles of techshit that need composting.
Collapse won’t be clean or total. It’s unlikely we’ll see a single cinematic moment. What’s far more likely is a long series of crises: recessions, austerity, market “corrections”, institutional decay, shrinking legitimacy. Capitalism isn’t stable. It’s inherently extractive and unsustainable. Growth has been artificially inflated to concentrate wealth upward, while the real ecological, social, and psychological costs are pushed downward. The illusion of growth hides the reality of extraction.
Power won’t step aside politely, as legitimacy shrinks, power concentrates. Smaller and smaller groups cling to control through coercion, surveillance, and force. History shows that entrenched power has to be pushed over, not waited out. That doesn’t mean chaos. It means having something better ready.
All thinking is critique. If you aren’t looking at faults, you probably aren’t looking at the thing at all. Don’t be afraid of that. Gardening requires digging. Lift your head, your shovel. Dig, and plant.
Without parallel institutions, collapse just creates a vacuum. And vacuums get filled by the worst actors. What actually matters doesn’t appear magically after a crisis. Community, care, knowledge, trust, culture, and shared infrastructure are built slowly, beforehand, by people who show up consistently.
The #Fediverse is an accidental #openweb reboot – a product of #fashernista energy, messy and decentralised. Herding cats is hard, but it’s not a flaw. It’s the material we’re working with. One path forward is #OGB – grassroots, DIY producer governance – building shared norms and flows without hard centralisation.
This isn’t apocalypse fantasy, it’s continuity. Waiting for the system to fall is a losing strategy. Protesting without building is noise. Commentary without construction is theatre.
If you want change: build alongside, build underneath, build beyond. That isn’t extremism, it’s history.
We still haven’t solved this. Looking back at a conversation from six years ago, what stands out isn’t disagreement – it’s how hard it is to even name the problem we keep circling.
Over the last 20 years, again and again, the discussion slips into the same dead end: personal value versus social value, framed through the language of #dotcons platforms, followers, influence, and business growth. What we need to learn from this is the confusion isn’t accidental, it is structural.
What we need is not only #socialmedia value, not engagement, not visibility. But offline value that exists between people, over time, as shared culture, trust, memory, and capacity. The chicken-and-egg problem, people ask: “What personal value do I get from this?”, “Will this help my business?”, “Can I use this without it using me?”
We need to compost, this messy common sense path. This is why the #OMN project was never about optimising personal outcomes. That #blocking framing belongs to platform logic, the idea that every action must be measurable in reach, influence, growth, or return. This is why the posts, like the one embedded above, people found “hard to understand” weren’t speaking that language at all. It were articulating what the #mainstreaming was #blocking and thus missing from our tech culture: social value.
What is hard to communicate is that social value doesn’t work like our current common sense thinks it does. You don’t extract it first and then decide whether it was worth it. Social value only emerges after people act collectively, without clear personal payoff in advance. Yes, personal value does flow from social value. Skills, relationships, meaning, resilience, opportunity. But it’s indirect, uneven, and slow. That makes it almost invisible inside systems trained to ONLY prioritise immediate, individual reward.
That’s why the conversation keeps short-circuiting, one of the early questions was whether the posts were meant to “influence followers”. That already assumes a vertical model: speaker → audience → outcome.
But #OMN thinking starts from a different place. It’s not about influencing people. It’s about creating conditions where different kinds of interaction can happen – horizontally, over time, without a central controller. That’s why the work often looks vague, unfinished, or “omelette-like”. Cultural values can’t be shipped as a product. It has to be grown, maintained, and defended collectively.
#Facebook was a comfort trap in hindsight. In the thread, several people describe using it pragmatically: staying in touch, organising events, maintaining real-world relationships. All true, and still kinda true today. But the counter-point raised then has only become clearer since: you don’t get to opt out of being used, no matter how carefully you think you’re using the system.
The lock-in effect (“everyone is on it”) was already obvious. What was less visible to meany people than was how disastrously deeply this would shape behaviour, politics, culture, and attention – and how hard it would become to imagine alternatives once that infrastructure was taken for granted.
Why this was hard to hear at the time? This conversation shows how difficult it is to talk about non-market value inside market-dominated spaces. Language itself becomes a barrier. People reach for familiar metrics because they have no shared vocabulary for anything else. So the discussion stalls. People get frustrated. It feels circular. Someone says “find out for yourself”, another hears that as dismissal. Nobody is wrong in isolation, but the frame itself is broken.
What we can learn now? Six years on, a few things are clearer: Social value is real, but it’s slow, collective, and hard to quantify. #dotcons platforms systematically erase the conditions needed for social value to emerge. Personal value derived from social value is indirect, not extractive. You can’t explain this cleanly inside systems optimised against it. This wasn’t a failure of communication. It was an early signal that we were trying to grow an open, cultural infrastructure inside environments hostile to its very existence.
Now is time to work on the unfinished path… #OMN project was – and still is – about creating space for social value to exist again: shared media, shared process, shared governance, shared memory. That was hard to see then, it’s still hard to see now. But the confusion in this old thread isn’t embarrassing. It’s instructive. It shows exactly where the fault lines are, and why the work has always been hard, messy, slow, and necessary.
Some things only make sense after you start doing them together #KISS
The impulse, it’s not wrong. What is wrong is how often that anger gets misdirected sideways, inward, and downward instead of upward, toward actual power.
A lot of people who think of themselves as “radical” aren’t being radical at all. They’re being assholes with better language. Cancel culture in 2020 played a similar role to political correctness in the 1990s: a way to signal virtue, police behaviour, and avoid confronting real power.
An example of this – done right, a code of conduct isn’t a weapon. It’s not a piece of paper you use to beat people with. It’s a declaration that you will protect the people who actually need protection – from harassment, abuse, and structural harm.
Done wrong, rules become clubs. People pick them up and hit each other with them. The wording becomes vague, moralistic, and performative. The enforcement becomes selective. And suddenly “safety” is being used to silence any disagreement rather than defend the vulnerable.
That failure creates space for bad actors, conservatives step in and pretend they’re “speaking truth to power” or “defending free speech”, when what they’re really doing is exploiting the mess to protect the normal hierarchy and privilege. They’re not wrong that something’s broken – they’re wrong about what and why.
The behaviour being criticised isn’t a tribe. It’s a mode of thinking, a widespread, unspoken #postmodernism that still dominates contemporary discourse. A style of politics where everything is relative, language replaces material reality, and moral positioning matters more than any outcomes.
This thinking eats movements alive, it fragments people, replaces strategy with signalling, and turns accountability into spectacle. Most importantly, it redirects energy away from those actually using power. This is a dangerous moment because we no longer have a shared baseline of reality. The #mainstreaming narratives are designed to divide, distract, and trigger – pulling attention away from concrete demands and real accountability.
That didn’t come from nowhere, forty years of #neoliberal economics hollowed out material security. At the same time, generations were trained in postmodern academic frameworks that are excellent at critique but terrible at building shared ground. Strip out material analysis, strip out class, strip out power – and you’re left with vibes, identity skirmishes, and endless internal conflict.
That’s what #OMN has always been pointing toward: rebuilding social truth, shared process, and horizontal power in a culture trained to fragment itself. Without that, we keep fighting each other – and the #deathcult keeps winning.
Most of what the #fashionista fights and campaigns for, and expends endless energy on isn’t liberation, it’s unthinking equality in worshipping the #deathcult. The argument isn’t about whether the path is destructive. That’s quietly accepted ignored, inevitable, “just how things are.” The fight is about who gets included on the path, who gets representation, who gets a seat at the table – not about whether the table should exist, or whether it’s crushing everyone underneath it.
In this #mainstreaming, success means being allowed to participate in the same extractive systems, the same growth-at-all-costs economics, the same surveillance platforms, the same attention-harvesting tech, the same environmental destruction, as long as access is more “equal”, It’s little to do with emancipation, rather its about equal opportunity complicity.
This is how too often radical language gets emptied out, structural critique is replaced with branding. Power isn’t challenged; it’s redistributed symbolically. The mess keeps spreading, just with better covers and more diverse faces unrolling it.
The #fashionista mindset treats inclusion as the goal, rather than a first step for dismantling what is actually killing us. It can’t imagine stepping outside the current “safe” path, because its common sense value structure depends on recognition within it. The outcome? Dissent gets flattened into lifestyle, resistance becomes performance, politics becomes aesthetic alignment. And anyone who questions the underlying mess is treated as naive, impractical, or “not serious”.
But when the altar is poison, equal access to worship before it doesn’t make it less deadly. Real change means refusing to kneel to the altar itself, and that requires mess, conflict, loss of status, and building alternatives that don’t look good on a CV.
That’s why the #OMN path feels uncomfortable, unfashionable, and slow. It doesn’t offer better branding, it offers a way out. And in a culture addicted to surface, people can’t change, and thus refusing the #deathcult looks like heresy.
This story is about compost, not control: Our world is smeared in social shit. We live in a vast, stinking pile of it. The left has its post-modern shit – where truth dissolves into vibes and dreams. The right has its fascist shit – where truth is something you enforce with obedience and violence. We drink the seeping effluent from this dung heap. Our work, our shops, our politics, our tech… all of it is smeared in the same rot. The planet itself is decomposing under the weight of this social shit.
But, shit makes good compost, you just need a shovel, It’s useful to start this composting with #fashionista thinking being the enemy of compost, its one of the recurring problems in our movements, from grassroots tech to climate activism to alternative media, it is why we need to call out this #fashionista thinking. It’s damage, pushing a complacent, fear-based mindset shaped by aesthetics, purity, and performance rather than working process, mess, and collective work.
This blindness leads to a focus on control, which quickly turns toxic. The moment control becomes the organising principle, everything messy, experimental, or unfinished becomes a threat. And that’s when behaviour turns into this full-on #blocking.
This path of narrow “thinking” skips the first steps: The awkward attempts, the compost and mud, the scaffolding, the incomplete prototypes. Instead, it judges the seed for not already being a tree, the foundations for not being a building, and the prototype for not being a polished “safe” product.
It’s not just irritating, it’s actively destructive, when #fashionista worldview treats change like a commodity, it’s a poisonous dynamic. The refusal to understand #KISS process leaves people stuck in this dark pattern, mostly having no idea they’re doing it. This is a very contradictory issue, on one hand they can still believe they’re “defending standards”, protecting “the right way”, or acting as guardians of quality or values. But in practice, it’s ignorance, and malice or parody at worst. On the other there are nihilism just destroying everything, as I say it’s a mess.
Taking about an example of this mess
Organic metaphors help bridge the messy gap: A plant needs soil, soil needs compost, compost is messy. If you can’t handle the compost, you are not working in the garden.
Then we need to touch upon the defensiveness problem, when we challenge this behaviour you get instant negativity. A strong defensiveness kick because critiquing the #fashionista paradigm exposes the gap between self-image and real impact. People who think they’re “the adults in the room” get, fearful, then angry when told they’re slowing things down. They double down, personalise the issue, and then retreat into purity/safety politics.
Refusing to have conversational space outside the deathcult’s terms is, frankly, worshipping the #deathcult. Conversations become impossible, because they can’t tolerate talking outside the narrow bandwidth of #mainstreaming “common sense”, that is in “undefined terms”,
So what can we do? The #openweb reboot needs mess, not perfection. The tradition – the real open web, not the #NGO-sanitised simulation – is built on: rough consensus, running code, shared mistakes, public process, imperfect prototypes, open but flawed governance and messy collaboration. We need to communicate the understanding that everything meaningful starts rough, unfinished, and imperfect. Perfection is not the starting point, perfection is what you get after a thousand messy, iterative steps.
This is why #fashionista thinking harms the #openweb, a strong tendency to block all of this, and worst of all, it convinces people who should be building that, shaming, they’re “not good enough” to begin, this mess kills movements before they start. People trapped in this rarely see that they’re part of the problem, not the solution.
We need a culture that protects messy steps, if we want the #openweb to reboot in a way that isn’t swallowed by #dotcons logic. We need collective composting, not competitive posturing. Likewise, we need a culture that treats steps as legitimate even when they’re provisional, blurry, imperfect. Never judge the seed by the standards of the forest, nothing grows if people are afraid to plant in the first place.
The #OMN plan, is to keep working and presume people will stop being #mainstreaming prats at some point. And start doing useful #openweb tech. This could be you, message us if it is 🙂
Verticals can be fuckwits when it comes to anything horizontal. That’s not a personality flaw, it’s a values clash, a basic “common sense” failure.
You see this in every movement, and you can see it clearly online right now in the #openweb. Vertical thinking defaults to hierarchy, control, and enforcement. Horizontal thinking defaults to trust, process, and shared responsibility. When the former tries to manage the latter, everything breaks.
I short-circuit a lot of pointless debate by defining the terms #KISS, with a tech focus:
Left = open / trust
Right = control / fear
That’s it. Everything else is noise.
It’s pointless to build on complexity in a post-truth world powered by #techchurn and driven by #fashionista incentives. Complexity just becomes camouflage for power, branding, and control. We’ve spent the last few years watching this fail, over and over again.
Without this #KISS shortcut, we go nowhere, the real choice is simple: build social truth together, or keep worshipping the #deathcult.
The second option is what currently passes for “common sense.” The first one needs a shovel #OMN
For todays hard right mess, you don’t have to look back far to see how this works. Let’s look at a real world example: Argentina’s Dirty War wasn’t an “excess”, a few bad generals, as our liberal friends might say. It was state terrorism, built deliberately and scaled region-wide through right-wing #mainstreaming, they called this Operation Condor at the time.
In South America, from the late 1960s into the 1976 coup, repression was already underway with Peronism. After the junta took power, the gloves came off. This state sanctioned violence wasn’t aimed at only armed groups. It targeted everyone who didn’t fit: trade unionists, students, teachers, artists, journalists, lawyers, priests, activists, exiles. Political disagreement became a death sentence.
Every day people were kidnapped, disappeared into secret camps, tortured, executed, thrown from planes into the sea. Evidence erased. Bodies vanished. Between 22,000–30,000 killed or disappeared. Babies born in captivity were stolen and handed to regime families – identities erased as policy. This wasn’t isolated chaos, it was administration.
And it didn’t stop at national borders. Operation Condor wired together the dictatorships of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil. Shared intelligence. Joint death squads. Cross-border kidnappings and assassinations. Safe exile became a trap. People fled one regime only to be captured by another. This was a transnational system, not national repression.
Automotores Orletti. Death flights. The Caravan of Death. The murder of Orlando Letelier in Washington. This was global – Europe, the US, everywhere dissidents thought they were safe.
Foreign power mattered. The western mainstreaming, US, France, and others trained, armed, advised. Cold War “anti-communism” gave cover. Declassified documents show our officials knew, and the literal #deathcult machine kept running.
When our own politics changed, with president Carter who didn’t endorse the horror – he pushed human-rights language harder than anyone before him – but pressure isn’t power. By then the terror system was entrenched, protected by years of US military aid, diplomatic cover, and right-wing internal resistance inside Washington itself. You don’t politely stop an autonomous death machine already at scale.
Inside Argentina the net was wide. Jews – 1% of the population – made up 5–12% of victims. Anti-Semitism baked into “national security.” Children stolen. Families destroyed twice over.
Justice didn’t arrive cleanly or fast. Truth commissions. Trials. Then amnesties to protect the military. Decades of silence enforced by fear. What broke it wasn’t the state – it was the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, refusing to shut up, refusing to forget. Grassroots memory works as relentless pressure. From the 2000s, amnesties fell. Trials reopened. Convictions followed. Stolen children recovered their names. Planes used in death flights traced. Archives pried open. Not enough, but something.
This example, Operation Condor, shows what happens when hard right state power + neoliberal ideology + secrecy + transnational “cooperation” align. Violence becomes normal. Accountability disappears. “Security” becomes a licence to kill. This is a warning, because when terror is framed as “order”, it always comes back. We are on a path to repeat this mess, please let’s make the effort to become the change and challenge to do something better this time.
What we are suffering from a shortage of collective pathways. The crisis we are walking into isn’t caused by a lack of charisma or vision at the top. It’s caused by the cultural trap we’ve built around individual solutions to systemic problems. #stupidindividualism – the obsession with personal leaders, personal brands, personal genius – is going to kill millions and displace billions over the next 20 years. Not because individuals are inherently harmful, but because individualism is the wrong tool for a collapsing world.
Vertical thinking can’t see horizontal realities. If your whole value system is built around leaders, ranks, and “key figures,” you will be blind to the commons, to networks, to peer processes, to messy collective agency. And this blindness is not neutral, it accelerates #climatechaos, feeds the #deathcult, and locks us into the same extractive paths that got us here in the first place.
The way forward isn’t another charismatic savior or another “hero innovator.” What we need is to balance collective pathways built from the ground up. Any working future needs:
Networks, not heroes. Because no single person can hold the complexity ahead.
Practices, not brands. Because technique and culture outlast personalities.
Open processes, not closed hierarchies. Because transparency is the only antidote to captured systems.
Shared governance, not managed optics. Because appearance won’t save us, but participation might.
Messy, compostable infrastructures, not shiny hype machines. Because real change grows from what we renew, reuse, and reimagine, not what we market.
This thinking points toward the #OMN, not as a product, not as a platform, not as “the next big thing,” but as a path. A way of organising, publishing, coordinating, and governing that is native to the horizontal world we actually live in. A way to compost the #techshit and grow something more real.
We don’t need better leaders, we need better collectives, we need spaces where the horizontal becomes visible again. And we need them now.
The #mainstreaming has a crap story, they say that the crisis of communication – the noise, the chaos, the misinformation, the anxiety – can only be solved by “returning to trusted sources.” They will argue that decentralized media is dangerous, that the “wild internet” must be cleaned up, that only vetted, official voices should have reach.
They will say that decentralized paths, all horizontal spaces are inevitably viral cesspools, and that our #openweb native podcasts, newsletters, open blogs, fedi servers are similer unregulated contamination. The growing fascism, in the end, will push that non-institutional voices are a threat to public order. That public conversation must be brought back under professional management, them.
The line will be simple: “Let the experts speak. Everyone else, sit down.” This is the predictable response of a broken society that lost control of its own narratives. And yes, they are right about one thing, that Big Tech is a sewer. The #dotcons profit from rage, division, algorithmic sewage, and emotional manipulation. Their business model is engineered disinformation. They are the factories of mess we live in.
But the establishment’s mistake, or more accurately, their strategic convenient lie, is pretending we, the #openweb, are the same, we are not. The #fediverse is not Facebook, Podcasts are not TikTok, Blogs and newsletters are not X, the #openweb is not #AlgoMedia.
We are: human-scale, chronological, transparent, open-process, community governed, non-addictive, non-manipulative. Decentralized media is not chaos – it is plurality. The messy public – not the polished elitists – speaking in many voices.
The establishment wants a return to vertical media because they cannot see horizontal people. Their value system literally blinds them. They believe discourse must be orderly, top-down, fact-checked by institutions that have long since been captured by the #deathcult of capital and careerism.
The problem is not that too many people speak, the problem is that too few people have been allowed to listen. The #OMN is the seedling of the opposite vision, many small voices, widely distributed, human editorial networks, community amplification and messy compostable infrastructure. The fedi, podcasts, blogs, newsletters – these are not the disease. They are the immune system emerging in response to the disease.
The establishment sees disorder, we see a rewilding,
They see danger, we see a necessary correction.
They see fragmentation, we see a path back to collective agency.
Not only that, but the current #mainstreaming are desperate to recentralize the narrative because decentralization breaks their #deathcult monopole on truth, framing, and attention. The people do not need saving from themselves, they need saving from the system that hijacked their voices. They need a native path that is open, messy, federated, to push compostable public media, where trust is earned through transparency, not authority.
The Godfather films, aren’t only stories about criminals, they’re stories about the world we live in – hierarchy pretending to be community, patriarchy pretending to be protection, capitalism pretending to be freedom, politicians pretending to be legitimate, family pretending to be love. To put it simply it’s the #deathcult mythos in cinematic form.
They’re parables about how hierarchy rots everything it touches. The writers, Coppola and Puzo create a world where the mafia isn’t an aberration but a mirror of #mainstreaming power: patriarchal families, capitalist accumulation, politicians in pockets, and a state captured by private interests. It’s #deathcult logic wrapped in myth.
It opens not with the fake glamour of today’s action films, with none of the politically correct obscuring, but with real working people doing real life, it’s a view outside the current post truth polished mess. Lifting the lid to show what’s behind the shiny surface blindness, you watch this film today to experience filmmaking and politics, like meany older films, the pacing is slow. Our attention spans are broken, good to keep this in your mind as you learn to see anew this ethnography of a pastime.
The Corleones aren’t only monsters from the shadows; they’re the real face of American power with the mask removed. Vito Corleone is an older, more honest version of the #neoliberal billionaire who buys judges today. The story’s “crime families” are stand-ins for competing capitalist blocks. The story is a metaphor for how power protects itself, how legitimacy is a costume, and how the violence of the system, hides behind talk of “family,” “business,” “respect,” and “tradition.”
The first two films critique the world we live in, a family built on the same contradictions that tear it apart. Quotes:
“It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.” → the neoliberal worldview: harm without responsibility.
“I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.” → the essence of capitalist coercion: “choice” backed by threat.
“We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.” → capitalism’s real goal: monopoly masked as freedom.
“Just when I thought I was out…” → no exit from systems built on domination.
The films are showing us the mythology of the mainstreaming #deathcult. America as Mafia, Mafia as America.
The first film opens with a small man being crushed by the system: a father whose daughter is brutalized, and the courts shrug. This is how neoliberalism works: public services are defunded, fail, people are pushed into private “solutions.” Justice outsourced to a Don is no different from healthcare outsourced to a corporation: both sell what should be a right. Vito’s “friendship” is the same as corporate “philanthropy”, a mask over structural violence.
The “family” keeps up appearances – the bourgeoisie’s favourite hobby – while patriarchal rot devours everyone inside. Connie is beaten by Carlo, but the family shrugs because patriarchal norms demand they stay out of a “private matter.” The same system that fetishizes “protecting our women” abandons them whenever protection would inconvenience male hierarchy. It’s about too much control and not enough care.
Competition, crises, violence – the capitalist cycle – it is useful to see the mythology in #KISS terms, the Five Families aren’t criminals; they’re competing capitalist firms. Their war is a stand-in for economic crises. Clemenza even says these things happen “every ten years,” which is basically the capitalist business cycle.
The Tattaglias and Barzinis pushing heroin aren’t “more evil”, they’re the next stage of capitalism’s expansion, accumulation demanding new markets. Violence is “nothing personal,” which is how every predatory corporation sees the world.
Michael, capitalism’s golden child, was meant to be “legitimate” – a senator, a governor – respectable frontman to maintain the illusion. Instead, he becomes the perfect neoliberal mess: calm, disciplined, efficient, emotionally repressed, willing to destroy anyone to maintain order.
He is the patriarchal son weaponized. The obvious patriarchy flowing through the films is a useful reminder for some and insight for meany about what is the reality behind closed doors in the current hard right with their calling for “family values”.
By the end of the first film, when he wipes out all rivals, standing in a church professing faith, we see the metaphor: authoritarian capitalism, patriarchal religion, and state legitimacy all fused together. He “renounces Satan” while becoming him, the system itself.
Part II, sharpens this critique. We see young Vito’s rise in a world where #feudalism is giving way to capitalism, one hierarchy composting into another. He kills Don Fanucci (feudal power) so he can build Genco Olive Oil (capitalist power). Same structure, new branding.
Meanwhile, Michael, the more matured form of this system, expands the empire into Nevada, New York, Miami, Sicily, Cuba. It’s the globalisation arc. And like all global empires, it’s built on betrayal: Fredo’s betrayal (internal collapse), Kay’s rejection (patriarchal fragility exposed), Michael’s violence against his own (self-destruction inherent in all hierarchical systems). By killing Fredo “for the family,” Michael destroys the family. Capitalism works the same way: protecting profit destroys society.
And the ending is the #techcurn lesson: systems built on secrecy, power, and control always collapse inward, devouring the people they claim to protect. Michael Corleone is neoliberalism in human form. Vito is the earlier, “nicer” version of the same system. And the people around them? Compost.
The Cuba revolution is the one moment where the system cracks – the #openweb moment of the film – where people try to reclaim the commons, break the hierarchy, stop being pawns.
On the subject of filmmaking, a lot of the films’ technics now look every day, this is not because they are, they are brilliant, it’s because every film for the last 50 years has coped them and thus diluted their shine with mediacy. Open your eyes, afresh, watch the films, you are seeing the invention of cinema. When you are used to a lifetime of derivative drivel.
