Governance rooted in trust rather than formalized decision-making

In alternative paths and spaces, governance is rooted in trust rather than formalized decision-making. These are environments where shared values, relationships, and practical action matter more than rigid rules or bureaucratic processes. People who come from more institutional or #NGO-style backgrounds default to proposing formal structures – voting procedures, consensus check-ins, rotating chairs, code-of-conduct enforcement committees. While these processes feel necessary to them, in practice they fail in grassroots spaces. Why? Because, fundamentally, nobody has to do anything.

Take a volunteer grassroots run radical media collective, for example. If someone proposes a complex consensus model or tries to enforce step-by-step project plans, it usually ends with endless meetings, unresolved tensions, and burnout. The reason is simple, unlike in paid or hierarchical systems, there’s no leverage to force participation. When push comes to shove, people just walk away.

What happens next is revealing. After the mess, what we might call the composting of the formalized process, people who are still around begin to just do what needs to be done. A few trusted people pick up the shovel, others join in when they see real work happening. Momentum builds through doing, not debating. The group evolves informally, with leadership emerging from action and care, not from mandates. Trust grows as people witness each other’s commitment over time. This informal flow tends to work surprisingly well most of the time.

For example, in the early days of Indymedia, despite various affinity groups having very different political approaches, decisions often came down to who stepped up to do the tech work, write the stories, or run the servers. Trust was built by contribution and consistency. Similarly, in grassroots disaster relief efforts (like Occupy Sandy), attempts to impose centralized control often broke down. But mutual aid networks thrived on trust, initiative, and lightweight coordination, text threads, shared spreadsheets, and informal roles. It was messy, but it worked.

The insight, in trust-based spaces, power flows not from authority or process, but from care, responsibility, and visible action. People trust those who show up and do the work, not those who talk the most or try to control the process. While this model isn’t perfect – and trust can be broken – it often outperforms rigid structures in flexible, values-driven communities.

And then there’s the wannabe #nastyfew – those who feed off control, disruption and ego, often seeking to dominate through manipulation and obstruction. We don’t need to fight them head-on or sink into their drama. In healthy alternative spaces, we learn to step around them, focus on building trust and function, and let their influence compost along with the rest of the mess. In time, as we balance and grow, manage our own lives better, we can feel empowered to push them out of the way, not with force, but with the strength of community, clarity, and shared purpose. They might then become useful in some way?

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

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

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

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

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

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

For an alt #mainstreaming view

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

Composting the fiendly enemy

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

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

Porn is loneliness sold as sex.

Alcohol is escape sold as fun.

Fast food is poison sold as nourishment.

Luxuries are emptiness sold as joy.

Video games are isolation sold as play.

Celebrities are ads sold as role models.

Drugs are numbness sold as happiness.

Social media is likes sold as friendship.

Smoking is addiction sold as relaxation.

Scrolling is distraction sold as downtime.

From the #dotcons

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

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

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

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

Let’s start, you need a shovel #OMN

Composting the fiendlyenemy’s

The West, Russia, and the madness of mutual sabotage

With the current hard move to the right let’s look at the current mess more clearly, we’re watching the slow-motion implosion of geopolitical sanity, driven by a feedback loop of paranoia, expansionism, and elitist delusion all round. I will use an example, the Russian neo-monarchy we installed with the fall of the #USSR is both authoritarian and insulated from reality, it harbours a deeply ingrained – but not entirely unfounded – fear, that the West wants to partition and neuter Russia, to finally break its imperial spine and sideline it permanently from global power.

The response to this is predicable, the wannabe Russian Empire moves to lash outwards. Expand. Destabilize. Subvert. Sabotage. Whether in Ukraine, Syria, Africa, or via bot farms and proxy networks, the strategy is the same, externalize the crisis, manufacture mess, weaken the “enemy”, and in doing so, fortify internal control. It’s a survival tactic wrapped in a brutal shell of historical grievance and nationalist myth-making.

But, what we do, in the West, in response is the real insanity, our response mirrors the very thing they fear. The West’s led by Washington #neoliberal hawks, Eurocentrists, and the ever-profitable security-industrial complex – isn’t, peace, trade, exchange, strategic clarity, de-escalation, or rebuilding multilateral resilience. No. It’s tit-for-tat sabotage, economic warfare, arms races, and public rhetoric that edges ever closer to advocating regime change, disintegration, and total subjugation. The wet dream of the #nastyfew think tank ghouls, a post-Russia carved up, pacified, and absorbed into the #closedweb of western corporate “freedom.” they tried it after the breakup of the #USSR, and now we repeat the same crap plan.

Do we really think it helps to become the very monster the Russians, are not without foundation, paranoid about, and already believe us to be? Yes, we do keep repeating this path of endless #fuckwittery feedback loops, imperial reaction and counter-reaction has been the geopolitics of the #deathcult for way too long. The world we have now is a paranoid empire meets a suicidal empire, Russia, trapped in its authoritarian echo chamber, acts from a place of imperial insecurity. It remembers the Cold War, NATO’s slow crawl eastward, the gutting of its economy in the ’90s under western advisors. Its fear is rooted in historical trauma, yes – but also in hard analysis. The West has pushed precisely the policies Russia fears.

Instead of “us” building genuine alternatives – non-aligned diplomacy, economic multipolarity, climate cooperation – we escalate. We double down. We treat their paranoia not as a challenge to deconstruct but a justification for more militarism, more sanctions, more media war, more fantasy of breaking the Russian state entirely. This is not a path to peace, this is not a path to any humanistic justice, this is mess-making on a planetary scale. And in the era of #climatechaos, where we face shared planetary collapse, it’s more than just dangerous, it’s become the hard right’s apocalyptic fantasy of civilizational suicide.

Let’s be very clear, this cycle is not driven by “the people.” It’s the #nastyfew, the hard-right elitists, ideologues, the nationalist technocrats and billionaire opportunists who feed on fear and profit from instability. In Russia, they wear the mask of Orthodox autocracy. In the West, they wear the suits of think tanks and boardrooms. But their vision is now the same, control through collapse.

They aren’t interested in saving the world, they want to own the wreckage. They’re building bunkers while the rest of us fight over ruins. They’re funding war while cutting climate adaptation, speak of “freedom” while mining the last drops of oil and blood. This isn’t realism, it’s delusion, this isn’t defence, it’s offence by inertia, this isn’t strategy. What it is, is the new #deathcult replacing the dead old one of 40 years of neoliberalism.

Where now? What we don’t need is more war games, we don’t need to break Russia or “win” against China. A key though is we don’t need to be right – we need to be alive, and for that we need radical de-escalation, grassroots diplomacy, and growing planetary solidarity. The answer to paranoid imperialism isn’t more imperialism – it’s compost. Yes, compost. We need to take this mess, this decaying structure of late-stage empire, and break it down into something fertile.

We need to stop thinking like empires and start thinking like ecologies. Build networks, not states, trust, not surveillance, infrastructure of care, not bombs, media for truth, not narrative warfare. We can’t outsource survival to failing nation-states, or hand over justice to militaries. What we need is a grassroots push to step outside the spiral. The #openweb gives us a glimpse of this possibility: federated, decentralized, trust-based networks that grow from the ground, not fall from the sky. What comes next depends on what we build in the growing cracks. Because we can’t keep feeding this mess.

Why the Russian constitution matters: the dark arts of constitutional law

Review: Who Broke the Internet? – Podcast with Cory Doctorow

🎧 Listen on CBC

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.

More thoughts on grassroots change and challenge paths: http://hamishcampbell.com

The mess we make – capitalism and climatechaos

The current extreme inequality between rich and poor isn’t a bug in the system – it’s a feature of capitalism. It’s not just inevitable, it’s desirable for those who benefit from it. The structure is built to concentrate wealth and power for the #nastyfew at the top, while extracting labour and resources from the grassroots at the bottom. A contemptible disregard for those less fortunate is the design, not some unfortunate side effect our #NGO’s tell us about.

Take a walk through any city, and you’ll see it in the gleaming skyscrapers rising above sprawling slums. In places like Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, or Cape Town, the inequality is visible at a glance. But even in the Global North, it’s masked behind fences, zoning laws, and digital walls. Capitalism excels at keeping suffering hidden or aestheticized so the few who grow fat don’t have to think about it.

With #climatechaos as the planet continues to heat up, these divisions are only becoming more grotesque. Climate change, driven by the lifestyles and consumption habits of the Global North, will over the next 20 years be felt much more in the Global South. Rich countries, like ourselves in the UK, will continue to talk about carbon neutrality and green energy transitions, while still pushing our use of pollution-heavy industries and extracting rare earth minerals into poor nations, leaving growing environmental and human devastation in their wake.

Examples are everywhere:

Electronic waste, of our shiny new gadgets which we replaced every year or two, but where do the old ones go? Places like Agbogbloshie in Ghana, one of the world’s largest e-waste dumps, for children to pick through toxic waste for scraps of metal, breathing in fumes and dying young.
Fast fashion, cheap clothes from brands like H&M or Zara, are made in sweatshops in Bangladesh or Cambodia, where workers earn a few dollars a day, labouring in unsafe conditions that led to tragedies like the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013.
Climate displacement, sea levels, floods, droughts, and extreme weather events are forcing millions to migrate. Communities in the Pacific Islands are disappearing beneath the sea, while African farmers face collapsed food systems. Yet, it should be obvious that they’re the ones who contributed least to the crisis. And when they try to migrate for survival, they’re met with growing border walls and dehumanization.

This isn’t an accident, it’s how this nasty unthinking path works – externalize the damage, push it as far away as possible, and then build walls, digital and physical, to keep the consequences out of sight. Whether it’s the child labour behind our smartphones, the communities poisoned by oil pipelines, or the forests razed for palm oil, these are the visible costs of our convenience. That is if we look at all. In this mess of a path, capitalism is a system of organized forgetting. It turns ecosystems into commodities, people into data points, and suffering into an acceptable byproduct. The #nastyfew, and in this context this is meany of us, get to live in curated bubbles of comfort, while the damage is made invisible – outsourced, decontextualized, and sanitized.

Best not to keep being a prat about this.

And let’s be clear, climate change isn’t a technical problem in need of genius innovation. We already know what causes it – our addiction to fossil fuels, deforestation, industrial agriculture – and we’ve had the solutions for decades: political change and challenge to reduce emissions, transition to renewables, protect ecosystems, and radically change consumption patterns. So when people talk about “putting our brightest minds on solving climate change,” they’re both deluded and deflecting. This isn’t about a lack of intelligence or ideas; it’s about wilful political paralysis and #nastyfew vested interests. Those in power cant think outside of private escape bunkers in New Zealand. It’s not a knowledge gap – it’s a power and values gap. And that’s the much harder issue that we need to compost.

Don’t be a prat, please try and recognize the roots of issues

Horizontal people always get fucked over by vertical people. This is normal, why? Because horizontals give away power to build social fabric, while verticals hoard and concentrate power to extract and dominate. Every. Single. Time.

And the only thing that makes horizontals work, in the face of such mess making, is shared worldview, which we currently lack. Instead, we’ve got swarms of #stupidindividualism, where everyone thinks they’re the centre of the universe, interpreting everything as if their personal “common sense” whims are political strategy. And then, surprise! We keep getting steam rolled.

An example, let’s bring in the rot of #postmodernism, the #pomo guy proudly clams that “Ah, but classification requires a classifier!” This is what #postmodernism does to your brain. It unplugs you from reality while pretending it’s insight. It’s true that classifiers precede categories linguistically. But the material world precedes both. Rocks didn’t need a PhD to be granite.

This kind of derangement isn’t just stupid, it’s systemically useful to the #deathcult. Because if you believe that value only exists if humans assign it, then a tree has no value unless it can be turned into toilet paper. A whale has no value unless it can be monetized or aestheticized. Nature becomes valueless. And so it’s obliterated.

Meanwhile, people in the #fediverse are still pretending codebases matter more than people. No. The value of the Fediverse is in the humans running the instances and inhabiting them. Not the bloody Git repos. Without people, the code is just more maths.

On this #FOSS path, don’t be a prat. Recognize the root issue:

The #geekproblem
The collapse of shared worldview
The enshrinement of individual narcissism over collective meaning
The complete #deathcult worship of self over system pushed by our #nastyfew

Let’s compost this mess. #OMN #OGB #4opens #indymediaback

If I were a Communist

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.

It’s not utopia. It’s not perfect. It’s just a path forward that doesn’t end in collapse, burnout, and brutal inequality. This isn’t a manifesto. It’s a spade in the soil. Time to dig.

Let’s build from the rot something rich, wild, rooted, and real

The worst parts of people and society – fear, greed, envy, control – are self-reinforcing. They act as feedback loops in a broken sound system: shrieking, distorting, drowning out all nuance is the signal-to-noise issue we need to mediate. The problem is that some people feed on this noise. The media amplifies it. Social networks algorithmically reward it. This cycle of breaking – where outrage breeds more outrage, where mistrust deepens isolation, and where competition crushes collaboration – is an act of destruction. It corrodes relationships, communities, and in the end our capacity to imagine a better world.

We see this every day:

Clickbait headlines that fuel division because rage gets more views than reason.

Politicians who stoke fear to gain power, scapegoating the most vulnerable.

Tech platforms that extract attention through anxiety and reward extremism.

Economic systems that pit workers against each other, just to survive.

To compost this mess, we have to do the opposite to this current “common sense”: to normalize and nourish the best parts of people and society, trust, generosity, curiosity, empathy. When these values are much more visible, practiced, and shared, people can feed on hope instead of despair. This cycle of creation builds, it doesn’t break. It connects, it doesn’t divide. Examples of composting:

Mutual aid groups during crises, where strangers organize to care for one another without waiting for permission or profit.

Community-run media that uplifts real voices, telling stories not as commodities but as threads in a shared tapestry.

Free software movements built not on scarcity and control but on abundance and sharing.

Occupy kitchens, copwatch collectives, local food co-ops, and even open-source libraries — all rooted in the principle: we are stronger together.

The problem is capitalism, in its current form, is a system founded on the worst instincts, it glorifies greed, promotes fear, breeds control, and accumulates power in the hands of the #nastyfew. It at long last now be obverse that it is a system that thrives on destruction – of nature, of community, of meaning.

In contrast, socialism and anarchism, at their best, are grounded in trust, solidarity, and hope. They offer frameworks for cooperation without coercion, for shared abundance, for bottom-up resilience. These are not utopias – they are gardens. Messy, real, and alive. They root us in better soil – the kind where the seeds of collective flourishing can actually grow.

We do need to stand, together, shovels in our hands. The world is breaking, but we are not powerless. The mess is here, let’s not run from it, let’s work to compost it. Let’s build from the rot something rich, something wild, rooted, and real.

What do we balance this with? The #OMN projects – short for Open Media Network – are not a brand, not a platform, and not a startup. They’re a loosely coordinated, commons-rooted pathway emerging from the native #openweb trajectory. They’re aimed at building a livable media ecology, that grows from open-source ethics, affinity-based social organization, and federated infrastructure rather than enclosure, extractivism and spectacle.

Rather than falling into the traps of heroic dev culture or platform monoculture, #OMN treats tech as an ensemble process: modular, collectively maintainable, and explicitly oriented toward mutual coordination and deliberation, not content flow or engagement metrics. It’s tech that refuses to pretend it’s neutral.

The point is not digital for digital’s sake. These networks are meant to scaffold on-the-ground, hybrid practices – to support real-world collective activity, embedded presence, and the messy, rhythmic back-and-forth of embodied organizing.

Unlike most open-source projects that depend on the labour of isolated overcommitted maintainers (and collapse when they burn out), #OMN foregrounds shared stewardship and viscous governance – avoiding the trap of what is aptly called #stupidindividualism. This is code with a metabolism, not code as artifact.

Philosophically, #OMN differs from most “tech for good” efforts by refusing to detach “technology” from semiotic infrastructure. Defaults, interfaces, metaphors, these aren’t just UI choices; they’re interpretive compressions that shape how collectives think, decide, and remember.

So the stakes are high. Latency pressures, whether social, cognitive, or computational, have to be designed for, not ignored. That means systems that scaffold deliberation, not shortcut it. That means treating the commons as composed, not given, building stacks that help ensembles hold interpretive tension instead of collapsing into fast consensus or false clarity.

In short: #OMN is infrastructure for the kind of world where #4opens matters. It’s a path to build tech that metabolizes collective meaning-making under conditions of mortal constraint. Not because it’s ideal – but because it’s necessary.

Enclosure of self is deathcult worship in the era of #climatchaos

#deathcult / #geekproblem / #nothingnew

#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.

Rebooting the Fourth Estate: Building tools for grassroots governance

We’re living in the wreckage of the old 19th century social order. The so-called Four Estates, pillars of traditional power and authority, which 200 years latter are either rotting from within or already dead. It’s now past time to stop mourning and start composting this. Right now we are doing this at the #OMN we’re outlining and building horizontal social/digital tools to grow grassroots governance, aiming to replace what no longer serves us. These tools are based on tested activist process and being built out using current working federated technology through the Open Media Network (#OMN).

Before we get into that, let’s break down the old foundational history:

Lords Temporal – the elites, landowners, oligarchs. Fuckum. Their power is bloated and corrupt. From billionaires flying private jets to COP summits while the planet burns, to political dynasties laughing at austerity from gated compounds, they’re done, even if they don’t know it yet.

Lords Spiritual – organized religion as moral compass? Please. They long ago ceded relevance. As the Church clutches pearls over gender and culture wars, the people are elsewhere, building new values and solidarities.
House of Commons – dysfunctional, what was meant to represent the people now represents donors, lobbyists, and corporate interests. Labour and Tory are different shades of the same managerial grey. Real democracy? It’s not coming from Westminster.
Journalism – the one estate still standing, sort of. But it’s on life support. Mainstream media dances to the tune of its billionaire owners, or worse, chases clicks in the race to the bottom. The BBC parrots government lines and succumbs to culture war baiting.

So what’s next? Our mission is not salvaging old institutions, others can try that path. We’re building on different traditions and mythology. Right now, people are fleeing from the corporate-controlled web (#dotcons) and rediscovering decentralized platforms: Mastodon, Peertube and others built on #ActivityPub. These are important steps towards a federated path. But tech alone isn’t enough, we need governance. We need trust-based, horizontal, transparent tools that empower communities to organize, decide, and act together without traditional gatekeepers.

That’s where the Open Media Network (#OMN) projects come in. We’re designing and testing code to enable this shift, tools for publishing, moderation, and coordination that are rooted in the #4opens: open data, open source, open governance, and open standards. It’s messy, yes. But so is composting. And from that mess, we grow soil. Soil for new media, new movements, and new paths as the old crumbles.

We’re starting with the last two relevant estates: journalism and representative governance. Both are broken, but maybe still salvageable, not by patching them up, but by rebooting change and challenge from the ground up. Think of it as digital mutual aid, media gardening, and radical democracy rolled into one. We have project outlines, we have grounded flows and process. We just need more people who give a shit. This is an invitation, to join, and help build media and governance paths that actually works for the many, not only the churning #nastyfew.

Neoliberalism, Fascism

The best working definition of fascism is simple, economic: “The continuation of capitalism by undemocratic means.” This isn’t abstract theory. Fascism in the 1920s and 30s emerged precisely in response to a very real threat of revolutionary socialism. The Russian Revolution sparked global fear among the capitalist class that their time was up. Fascism – in Italy, Germany, Spain, Austria – arose as a counter-revolution. It wasn’t merely authoritarian nationalism or aesthetic militarism. It was the repressive armour worn by capitalism under existential threat.

Look at the details: In Spain, Franco rose after a democratically elected socialist government began to challenge entrenched economic power. In Germany, the first Nazi concentration camps were built for communists, not Jews. In Chile in the 1970s, the overthrow of Allende’s democratic socialist government was orchestrated by domestic elites and foreign (read: U.S.) interests terrified of socialism spreading in Latin America. Fascism wasn’t a deviation. It was capitalism defending itself with violence. Today, we face the same moment – and too many are looking the other way.

For 40 years, neoliberalism, that mix of deregulation, privatization, and gutting of social safety nets, has shaped our economics and cultures unchallenged. Its effects are easy to see: skyrocketing inequality, mass precarity, and ecological breakdown. But there’s a dangerous myth that neoliberalism is simply unregulated capitalism. In truth, it’s much closer path to economic fascism without the jackboots, until now.

#Neoliberalism didn’t grow in a vacuum. Its roots are in explicit reaction to socialism’s successes. Take Friedrich Hayek, ideological godfather of neoliberal – he was deeply disturbed by Red Vienna, where municipal socialism (like public housing) was working too well. His entire framework arose as an intellectual counterattack to collectivist policies.

And Hayek wasn’t just an ivory tower academic. He directly shaped the policies of Thatcher, Reagan, Pinochet, and the Chicago Boys – bringing theory to life through brutal economic “shock therapy.” Thatcher herself famously declared during a cabinet meeting: “This is what we believe” as she slammed Hayek’s book on the table.

From Mussolini to Musk, capitalism’s new wannabe strongmen. There’s little material difference between Mussolini’s Italy selling off state assets to loyal industrialists and today’s global elites (#nastyfew) hoovering up public infrastructure in the guise of “efficiency.” Mussolini at least expected those capitalists to serve the nation. Neoliberalism assumes, foolishly, that global capital will take care of society without loyalty, borders, or accountability.

In Russia, we see a more classical fascist arrangement: oligarchs allowed to profit, provided they serve the state’s nationalist goals. In the U.S., capital’s alignment with far-right politics is more chaotic but no less real. Corporations rarely oppose Trumpism, despite its chaos. Why? Because, as with 1930s Europe or 1970s Chile, fascism is good for business – so long as the profits roll in and unions, climate activists, and grassroots movements are crushed.

Where we are now is neoliberalism’s endgame, capitalism is in crisis again. But this time the existential threat isn’t just socialism – it’s climate and ecological collapse, a crisis neoliberalism created and cannot solve. And once again, the system’s response is not reform, but repression. Neoliberalism cannot survive democratically. The people don’t want it. So increasingly, undemocratic means are being deployed: voter suppression, propaganda, surveillance, repression, and the rise of far-right movements that promise “order” and scapegoats instead of justice. This is fascism, not a return to it, but its next iteration.

So what now? We don’t just need to resist this – we need to name it. Clearly. Loudly. Repeatedly. The myth that neoliberalism is merely “capitalism with the brakes off” must be composted. It is fascism with #PR. And as in the past, a step, a real alternative comes from the bottom up. From grassroots media, mutual aid networks, radical unions, climate justice movements, and the digital commons. We need to rebuild this solidarity, and we must do it #4opens horizontally, outside the broken institutions that created this mess.

The problem we face is simple and brutal. The right-wing eats everything. Every radical spark, every hopeful idea, every challenge to power, they swallow it, mutate it, and spit it back as bland, digestible social shit.

They take our justified rage and push it back as conspiracy. They take our care and twist it into control. Every revolutionary idea, stripped bare, rebranded, and fed into the #mainstreaming machine as more slop to feed and shape the masses.

This isn’t new. It’s the old game of cultural capture. And they’re very good at it. That’s why we need tools and paths they can’t easily co-opt. Stories they can’t rinse out and rebrand. Protocols that don’t translate into buzzword #blocking. The #4opens, the #OMN, the hashtag as resistance, are frameworks built to rot their greed and appetite.

We compost instead of consume. We grow native paths, not polished products. What we’re building is deliberately messy, deeply rooted, and absolutely unpalatable to the #nastyfew and their simpering acolytes. They want power. We want relational fabric. They want purity spirals and hot takes. We want compost, community, and continuity.

It’s a step. And that matters. As I always say – I like big ideas, but right now, I’m putting my shovel into small steps towards big ideas. That’s how you build something that lasts.