We need to stop worshipping a #deathcult

A path to do this is to step away from the #mainstreming mess. In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. The prize recognised their work on how institutions shape prosperity, most famously through their book Why Nations Fail. The timing matters, it matters a lot.

This award lands at exactly the moment we should be asking why Institutional Economics – the respectable face of #mainstreaming – has spent the last fifteen years pushing us to keep kneeling at the altar of the #deathcult of #neoliberalism.

For more than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis – a crisis that should have finished neoliberal economics for good – our liberal institutions quietly stepped in to rescue the doctrine. Not by defending it openly, but by reframing its failures. This wasn’t accidental. It’s central to the mess we’re living in now.

The 2008 crash began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and rapidly spread from finance into the real economy. It triggered the largest global contraction since World War II. Advanced economies saw GDP falls of over 10%. In the US alone, more than $16 trillion in household wealth vanished.

The shock was so extreme that Queen Elizabeth II famously asked economists at the London School of Economics why nobody had seen it coming, the profession replied that it was a “failure of the collective imagination”. That answer was revealing and evasive. Because imagination hadn’t been lacking before the crash. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, #neoliberalism dominated economics. Its core beliefs were simple, absolute, and aggressively enforced:

Markets are efficient

Deregulation increases productivity

Financial innovation reduces risk

Macroeconomic instability has been solved

These ideas were institutionalised across universities, central banks, and international organisations. Nobel Prizes were handed out to models built on perfectly rational actors and self-correcting markets. Central bankers talked confidently about a “Great Moderation”: stable inflation, steady growth, forever.

Economics became “scientific”, self-referential, and closed to challenge. This wasn’t wisdom, it was a pile of shit built on mathematical abstraction – a classic #geekproblem – detached from lived social reality. Financial fantasies were celebrated. Subprime mortgages were reframed as inclusion. Mortgage-backed securities were said to spread risk. Collateralised debt obligations were hailed as marvels of modern finance.

They were, in reality, weapons of mass financial destruction. The #deathcult was warming up. When the system collapsed, neoliberal economics should have been held to account. No theory in modern history had failed so completely, so quickly, with such devastating consequences. Instead, it reinvented itself.

The first move was redefinition. Under the Obama administration, the US abandoned laissez-faire dogma overnight. Banks were declared “systemically important”. Corporations were bailed out. Trillions were injected into markets through quantitative easing. Socialism for the rich was revealed as normal.

This should have been the moment it became obvious that #neoliberalism was never about principles. It was always about power. Markets, models, and theories were tools – not truths – used to maintain capital’s dominance over society. But what we got was the normal mess of denial, spin, and fragmentation.

Once stability returned, denial followed. Economists claimed victory. The crisis was blamed on interest rates, oil prices, China’s savings – anything except the theory itself. The line became: “The models failed to predict the crisis, but the solutions worked.” That sleight of hand kept neoliberalism alive.

Instead of lifting our heads and walking away, we fell for the smoke and mirrors. The priesthood fragmented neoliberalism into subfields, and our #fashionista classes filled the space. Game theory analysed distressed financial institutions without asking why they were distressed.
Behavioural economics blamed low-income borrowers’ “biases” while ignoring policies that made housing unaffordable. Feminist economics debated unpaid labour while leaving capital accumulation untouched.

Each critique was partial. Each acted as a distraction. None threatened the altar we were still collectively worshipping. The strongest shield, however, came from Institutional Economics – the respectable centre of #mainstreaming liberal thought.

Why, Why Nations Fail succeeds, it “common sense” argues that prosperity comes from “inclusive institutions” – markets, property rights, patents – supported by political institutions like democracy and the rule of law. “Extractive institutions”, we’re told, lead to stagnation.

This framework was easy to accept in the common-sense fog of the #fashionista class. It sounded critical while leaving capitalism intact. Weak, procedural democracy was sold as the mechanism that could tame markets.

What it ignored – completely – is that democracy inside highly unequal societies is easily captured by capital. Elections reproduce power relations far more often than they correct them. By declaring any market outcome produced through elections legitimate, the #nastyfew who this mess served grabbed and twisted “democratic” approval.

At a moment of global instability – Eurozone debt crises, austerity, mass unemployment – #mainstreaming economics offered a comforting story: the problem wasn’t capitalism, just “bad institutions”.

The reality on the ground, in Europe, austerity devastated entire societies. Greece lost over a quarter of its GDP. Youth unemployment passed 50%. Public assets were stripped. Debt increased. Today, a six-day work week is framed as “responsibility”.

In the United States, recovery was brutally unequal. Between 2009 and 2019, the top 1% captured 40% of all income growth. Asset prices exploded while wages stagnated. Private equity gutted industries. In the world of the #dotcons, gig work replaced stability. Neoliberalism didn’t retreat. It consolidated.

There was, however, a different path. China – worshipping a different cult – ignored neoliberal assumptions after 2008. Instead of monetary inflation, it pursued fiscal stimulus, infrastructure investment, R&D, and industrial policy. Growth remained high. Manufacturing expanded. Living standards improved. China became the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity more than a decade ago.

Western institutions urged “liberalisation”, framed through #mainstreaming economics. Political reform was demanded – meaning access for Western capital. China refused. When China’s property bubble burst in 2021, contagion was contained. Capital was redirected into technology and manufacturing. Industrial dominance accelerated.

This success could not be acknowledged, so institutional economics reframed it as “extractive”, unsustainable, and destined to collapse. Yet the facts contradict the story. Inequality is far higher in the US. China’s overproduction lowers global prices and stabilises living standards. Without it, global inequality would already be politically explosive.

So why are we still stuck, #Neoliberalism survives not because it works, but because it controls the story of what is possible. It offers legitimacy without transformation, democracy without redistribution, reform without power shifts.

Worse, over the last forty years it has reshaped education, work, identity, and the value of human life itself. It trained people to see themselves as assets, competitors, and risks. It normalised insecurity and abstraction. That’s why we’re facing collapse now: a system that has exhausted its social, ecological, and moral foundations.

Yes, it’s a mess, you probably need a shovel #OMN

We need to be disturbed

A mainstream example of (stupid) individualism

Have you noticed how, over the last few decades, many sentences are repeated so often they start to become “common sense”? “You need to love yourself” is one of these, it sounds harmless, kind, even progressive. But this sentence didn’t only reshape how we feel about ourselves – it reshapes how the economy works. This is a story about how “self-esteem” become an engine of #stupidindividualism, that helped produce the explosion of inequality and mess we now live inside.

Today, self-esteem is treated as a universal good. The cure for anxiety, failure, loneliness, precarity. If you’re struggling, the message is simple: look inward. Fix yourself. Believe harder. And that’s the trick, this isn’t about telling people to hate themselves. It’s about noticing that something deeply political has been smuggled into something that looks purely personal.

For most of human history, self-esteem wasn’t a virtue, it was a vice. Across Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, pride was seen as dangerous. The seed of arrogance, ignorance, suffering. Fulfilment came from humility, mutual obligation, and limits, not self-celebration. The very idea of “loving yourself” would have sounded morally wrong, not empowering. So how did pride get rebranded as progress?

In part this is a #geekproblem, in an industrialising world obsessed with measurement: output per worker, profit per hour, value per share. Humans were no longer judged by moral contribution, but by performance, self-esteem quietly became an economic variable.

Drum roll – we had the #neoliberal turn – market ideology glorifies selfishness, despises solidarity, and frames empathy as weakness. This mess was used to increase the push for common sense #mainstreaming heroes to be lone geniuses, the media meme helped to drive the invisible destruction of any shared social structures. Then helped to obfuscate when western economies dismantling welfare states, deregulating markets, outsourcing industrial labour and rebranding citizens as entrepreneurs of the self. This was not a coincidence.

With this ideological turn, structural problems were redefined as personal psychological failures. If you’re poor, anxious, unemployed – the problem isn’t the system – it’s your mindset. This become self-esteem as labour discipline. As blue-collar work paths closed and white-collar “service” work expanded, confidence became currency, not skill, care or competence.

To day in the daily grind, work rewards presentation, persuasion, and performance. Self-esteem became professional armour. Bragging outperformed quiet skill. Selling yourself matters more than doing the work. This is where #stupidindividualism hardens:

Success looks personal

Failure looks personal

Solidarity disappears

Power becomes invisible

Outside the office – consumerism becomes about buying self-worth. Advertising doesn’t sell products. It sells reassurance. A handbag isn’t a bag, a car isn’t transport, a platform isn’t communication. They’re proof that you matter, until the next upgrade. Self-esteem – the kind that depends on validation, status, and visibility – is never satisfied, which makes it incredibly profitable. Self-esteem becomes something you only can rent from the market.

Then we have the rule of the #nastyfew, the #CEO as narcissist-priest. Research shows corporate leadership selects for narcissistic traits: grandiosity, risk-taking, obsession with image, contempt for limits. These “leaders” chase metrics that look like success – stock price, media praise, personal compensation – while hollowing out organisations and communities we need to live and push the change and challenge we need in the era of #climatchaos and social break down. In this mess, confidence replaces accountability, performance replaces reality. Collapse soon follows.

In this mess, the easy to understand #KISS lie is that the quiet violence of the self-esteem ideology tells people to solve systemic harm as only personal feelings. It tells us to love ourselves inside conditions designed to grind us down. This is why self-esteem culture is the drug feeding us precarious work, algorithmic management, influencer economies and endless competition. It makes people blame themselves instead of the structures exploiting them.

What we can do – the #OMN hashtag story names this as #stupidindividualism: Radical inwardness paired with radical powerlessness, emotional self-management instead of collective change, narcissism dressed up as empowerment. That self-esteem like this is divorced from community, becomes a control system.

So, to say again, get off your knees, we don’t need more self-love slogans, we need shared power where native paths are about confidence that does not come from mainstreaming affirmations, rather from shared competence, mutual aid and belonging.

The project we need, the #OMN is not about polishing the self, instead it is a path to rebuild the commons which “self-esteem” was used to dismantle. So please stop worshipping yourself, start standing with others, this is how we compost this mess.

A mainstream question, what happened?

People keep asking the same question, because daily life keeps getting harder: Why is everything so expensive? Why is everyone so stressed? Why does it feel like the economy is rigged?

The short answer is – it is – The longer answer matters, because this didn’t happen by accident. For most of human history, wealth inequality was brutal. A tiny elitist crew owned almost everything, and most people lived short, precarious lives. That only changed briefly, and recently.

The Post-war exception (1945–1975). After World War II, something unusual happened. Governments become in part democratic, and with the balance of the Cold War, remembered what economic collapse leads to: fascism, war, and social breakdown. So they built a tightly regulated global economic system designed to keep things boringly stable. This was the Bretton Woods system.

Currencies were fixed. Banks were regulated. Capital was controlled. Unions were strong. Taxes on the rich were high – often 90%+ on top incomes and inheritances. And this worked from 1945 to the early 1970s. Wages rose with productivity, housing was affordable, one income could support a family, inequality fell, a broad middle class emerged. This wasn’t the “free market”. It was the opposite. It was embedded liberalism – markets contained by society, not the other way around.

The Crisis of the 1970s was when the system hit its limits. The US stopped running trade surpluses. The #coldwar drained resources, oil shocks sent inflation soaring. The Bretton Woods system collapsed in 1971. By the mid-1970s, the global economy was in stagflation: high inflation, high unemployment, low growth. For ordinary people, life got harder. For the #nastyfew elitists, something else happened. Their share of national income – quietly shrinking since the 1940s – suddenly mattered again. When growth slowed, they could no longer tolerate workers getting a larger slice of the pie.

This was the moment they chose #neoliberal counter-revolution, this wasn’t spontaneous, it was planned. Corporations funded think tanks, media narratives were reshaped, universities were targeted. Politics was captured from the inside. Business needed to seize cultural, political, and ideological power.

Thatcher, Reagan wasn’t neutral “economic science”, they were populist #classwar. Labour lost bargaining power, capital regained it. The tools of the post-war order were put to use – The IMF used debt crises to force austerity and privatization on the Global South, whole countries were stripped of economic sovereignty, poverty and inequality exploded. This was accumulation by dispossession – old colonial extraction, updated for financial capitalism.

Thatcher and Reagan:

Broke unions through force and law

Slashed taxes on the rich

Deregulated finance

Privatized public assets

Redefined government as the enemy

From this point on, productivity rose, but wages stopped. The new normal is ownership over work, it’s the world we live in now.

Housing treated as an investment, not a home

Wages stagnating while CEO pay explodes

Finance dominating the real economy

Debt disciplining both workers and nations

“Market logic” replacing democracy

This is not failure, it is success, for the people who pushed it. We now have 40 years of #mainstreaming to shift and compost.

Theological thinking disguised as economics

Why this matters for us, and why the #OMN projects matter for you. Media matters, #mainstreaming journalism, always reports within this system. It speaks truth from power – explaining, managing, normalising. What we need is grassroots journalism that speaks truth to power. We need more signal, and less noise in our own media. This signal asks: Who benefits? Who decides? Who pays? What was deliberately dismantled? What can be rebuilt – differently?

The native #openweb #OMN path is not about fixing the worship of the market. It’s about walking out of the temple. This economy was designed. That means it can be redesigned. But not by begging. Not by rearranging seats, and not by pretending this mess is accidental.

So if you want to help make one of this missing piler of society work, then #KISS get up, pick up a shovel, start composting the shite pile. That’s where new growth comes from.

“We, we, we,” they say – but who chooses the “we”?

Trump and Putin are the figureheads of the #deathcult and 3ed rate people like Staner are puppets. The #nastyfew, mostly invisible in the smoke and mirrors of #mainstreaming media, are the ones who push the “we”. And they also invest in a part of our “progressive” paths, always much less affective than they need to be, let’s look at this from the latest #AI tech the #dotcons and more importantly our own #NGO crew.

The core of the #NGO mess: they claim to represent everyone, while foreclosing every other possibility. “We, we, we,” they say – but who chooses the “we”? Meanwhile, the parasite class in tech has spent twenty years destroying the social fabric of the internet, turning everything into grift, extraction, and precarious dependence. There is every chance that this new wave of #AI/#NGO/#dotcons fusion will be just more mess for us to compost.

As I said, let’s look at these people who are in bed with the #dotcons, sucking at the teat (LINK) of the #nastyfew. It should be easy to see, at best they’re a warm blanket, precisely when we need a shovel. They always smother real change and real challenge while claiming to “scale impact.” and other buzzwords.

Working within the system and working outside it both have effects – and yes, we need to balance these paths. But let’s be honest: the “inside” path is 98% parasites, and the “outside” path is full of fashionistas hiding insider routes behind radical posturing. So the balance point isn’t where we think it is. It has to be pushed far, far back from the centre we’ve been trained to accept.

Yes, there is some value in their affective progressive-tech narratives, but it is a tiny force against the power of global capital. They love the idea of the “bridging node,” the mythical middle ground where nothing is actually bridged and nothing is actually changed. Soft, persuasive, endlessly consulting, the #NGO path is a warm blanket to snugal when you should be getting up to work. It comforts, it reassures, and it is collectively ineffective. In the end, that blanket is all they have to offer: a feeling, not a transformation.

And then there’s all the #AI, most of it #techshit witch we need to be clear, is not intelligence, just more civic control in the hands of the #nastyfew. LLMs, image recognition, all of it: tools with some utility, but zero real intelligence. What they do enable is more vertical power, refined manipulation, more subtle control, more extraction of attention, behaviour, and labour through the constantly spreading #dotcons.

With our ongoing #openweb reboot we need a real democratic steering wheel again, actual power to change, not ONLY warm blankets and #PR funding. This is why the #OMN, the #4opens, and the slow work of composting matter. Because every other path on offer right now leads straight back to the same smothering, stagnant centre – the place where nothing grows.

#OMN

The Mess is Boiling

We’re in a mess, our worship of the #deathcult has driven emissions to another record: the world’s CO₂ levels jumped by 3.5 parts per million from 2023 to 2024 the largest single-year increase on record. Our decision to leave the #nastyfew in charge – our short-sightedness and worship of greed – has pushed the planet beyond the stable ecosystem that supported human life. We have done this for nothing, only for big numbers to go up, for nothing. The one planet we know that can support life is being burnt to a crisp for nothing.

There are two reasons. First: we’re still burning, still digging, still feeding the growth obsession. Emissions are rising – the curve is bending, but not nearly fast enough. Second: the planet’s natural buffers – forests, wetlands, oceans – are weakening. The carbon sinks are choking: less CO₂ is being absorbed and more remains suspended in the atmosphere.

The math is brutal and simple: more in, less out. The atmosphere fills faster; the climate accelerates. This isn’t a surprise – scientists warned us for decades – but the facts are stark: we’ve locked in more than 1.5°C of warming. The UN has said it plainly. In the UK, the Climate Change Committee told the government to start planning for a +2°C world. That’s not a prediction, it’s a plan for failure.

If we want credibility beyond our grassroots #DIY bubble to change and challenge a wider #mainstreaming audience, we must call out both corruption and profiteering within the so-called eco industry as well as celebrate any genuine innovation. Otherwise, billions are spent on initiatives that inflate costs while ‘eco leaders’ jet around in privilege and luxury. Tens of millions in the West are angry about this corruption and injustice. But the effect is negative, that anger is feeding a hard shift to the right which will #block any meaningful progress toward sustainability.

The problem isn’t that we don’t know what to do. The solutions exist and are already working in many places, but we’re not scaling them quickly enough. Renewables are expanding, but too slowly. Deforestation is slowing, but not enough to save the canopy. Methane-detection and fixes are finally being reported more widely – responses have risen from around 1% to 12% – but that’s still negligible compared with what’s required.

The story of the living world since 1970 is one of catastrophic loss: roughly 73% of wildlife populations wiped out. The curve may flatten slightly at the end, but only after the living world has been gutted. That’s not balance, that’s exhaustion.

The catastrophe we are facing is because of a tiny number of powerful actors and their enablers, pushed past tipping points in multiple systems. Warm-water corals have crossed thresholds: the ocean is too hot for recovery in many regions; collapse is now locked in. The Amazon risks drying into Savannah. Ice sheets are destabilising. Methane is beginning to be released from thawing tundra. We’ve crossed a red line.

Meanwhile, political theatre keeps serving up delays and rollbacks. A global carbon tax for shipping was scuppered by hardline actors; the Net Zero Banking Alliance collapsed under pressure. While leaders squabble, the Atlantic produced one of its strongest-ever storms for this time of year – Hurricane Melissa – supercharged by waters heated by our pollution.

For anyone paying attention, recent months have been the worst climate months on record, not only in numbers but in meaning. We’ve forced the planet into feedback loops. Scientists warned this would happen; watching it unfolds brings a new grief.

Yet despair is not a plan. The #deathcult wants us paralysed, to claim “it’s too late.” But this isn’t binary. A planet at 1.5°C is bad; at 2°C it’s worse; at 3°C it’s catastrophic. Every fraction of a degree matters. Most projections today point to a 2.5–3.0°C increase by century’s end under optimistic political assumptions. A more realistic projection, accounting for slower, fragmented action, could be 3.0–3.5°C by 2100.

From a #spiky perspective: Western electorates are increasingly choosing far-right, climate-denying parties. Growth is capitalism’s lifeblood, but it’s death for the environment. Leaving decisions that affect society to a tiny, profit-driven minority is morally unacceptable. This isn’t a technological problem we lack the tools to solve – we have the tools. Instead, a relatively tiny number of selfish actors and their fear and greed are blocking meaningful change.

From a #fluffy perspective: Individuals, billions of us, can act. Start with these everyday steps:

Eat a plant-based diet instead of meat and dairy.

Use public transport, cycling and trains instead of cars.

Buy less; choose used over new whenever possible.

Insulate homes and reduce energy consumption.

Support and use renewable energy: solar and wind.

We can’t walk away from this, the only option is challenge. Reconciling this fluffy and spiky debates is the hardest part: we must act without illusions. We may never “win” in a clean, final sense, but our actions still matter. The difference between 2°C and 3°C will cost billions of lives. The difference between despair and defiance is the grassroots #DIY future we need to seed and grow.

From the spiky side, some argue for direct action: break laws that protect destructive industries, sabotage systems that perpetuate ecological harm, or withdraw labour to halt the economy. These are radical proposals with profound ethical and practical consequences.

From the fluffy side: consider moderating those impulses. Channel energy into mass organising, nonviolent direct action, community resilience, and building alternatives that scale. We need both defiance and construction: refuse what destroys us and build what sustains us. That is how we turn grief into resolve. From the fluffy side, maybe mediate your blocking of this needed spiky path?

How fascism actually works

How can we get people to see that #Fascism isn’t only about goose-stepping soldiers or dictators shouting from balconies – that’s the cartoon version. The current danger sits much closer to home. Fascism is the extreme end of a spectrum that runs right through our everyday lives: hierarchy, obedience, control, and fear dressed up as “common sense.”

It’s an old story of the #nastyfew controlling the many through managed fear. A dictator doesn’t rise from nowhere, they’re made possible by the people who go along quietly. Not because they’re zealots, but because they’re scared of losing their jobs, their status, their comfort, their lazy thinking.

That’s the quiet machinery of fascism: not just one man with a plan, but a whole system of compliance. Teachers, engineers, clerks, journalists, in the 1930s most joined the Nazi Party not out of belief, but because they had to in order to work. It wasn’t terror of death that ruled them, but terror of being left out.

And this hasn’t gone away, it’s still the mess we swim in. The #deathcult of #neoliberalism runs on the same fuel. The #NGO world, the corporate #dotcons, the mainstream media, all are built on quiet obedience and careerist cowardice. “Don’t speak up, you’ll lose your funding, your platform, your relevance.”

As Upton Sinclair said: “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.” That’s how evil becomes banal, not in the villains, but in the everyday silences that pushes systems over all of us.

So when people say, “I can’t speak up, I’ll lose my job,” I get it. But understand what that means, it’s the same mechanism that built the worst social systems in history. The real question is what happens after the first person speaks out. Because there always has to be a second, and a third. That’s how the wall cracks – not with one heroic act, but with collective courage.

This is what we’re trying to nurture with the #OMN – a network built not on fear or control, but of trust and openness. #4opens is our inoculation against fascism in tech. These are not only tech slogans, they’re social tools for courage, for rebuilding collective strength.

We need to compost the rot of obedience, turn it into soil for something alive again. The first one through the door often takes a hit, yes – but the rest of us can’t just stand there watching. Freedom isn’t found in silence or safety. It’s found in trust, in solidarity, in messy, shared action. We either move through that door together – or we stay in the dark alone.

We worshipped a #deathcult for 40 years

It’s how humans have always lived – together

For 200 years, capitalism, for the last 40 years #neoliberalism, taught us that we’re isolated individuals who compete to survive. But any real view of our actual history – and our biology – say the opposite: we’re interdependent, social, and ecological beings. For almost all species time before the current mess, we thrived through commons-based systems, shared forests, grazing lands, rivers, and community knowledge. Villages maintained open wells, fishermen shared tidal calendars, and guilds protected collective craft standards. Cooperation, not competition, is what allowed us to endure.

This is why now alt tech, matters, it is about rediscovering, what makes us human, the digital form of that is commoning online. Just as medieval commons were fenced off during enclosure, our early digital commons were captured by #dotcons. Rebuilding the #openweb is the act of reclaiming that shared ground, not nostalgia, but in the era of #climatechaos and hard right shift its #KISS survival.

What we need to compost is our own-shared memory. The commons are missing from today’s “common sense”. The idea that people can manage shared resources together has vanished from public imagination. Yet the commons is the older, more adaptive, and far more humane way of organizing.

In tech, the #Fediverse shows this in action, thousands of community run servers cooperating through a shared protocol, ActivityPub. Projects like #PeerTube, #Pixelfed, or #Funkwhale replace enclosure with federation, showing that open paths can scale through trust rather than control. Alt tech, built on open protocols and co-governance, is simply the digital commons rebooted, a network of networks where no one owns the whole.

We need much more resources and focus pushed into this real grassroots path of reclaiming the means of communication, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the internet was all ready a commons: decentralized, people-driven, and impactful. Early #Indymedia collectives covered protests outside mainstream #blocking narratives. #4opens email lists and wikis built movements across borders. Then capital pushed in, WE let the #nastyfew of #Facebook, #Google etc privatize our collective infrastructure, turning participation into surveillance and creativity into content.

Alt tech projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network), Mastodon, and wider #Fediverse are attempts to rebuild what we keep forgetting, this time, protected by #4opens shield to build shared governance. This path is not a nostalgic throwback, but living/acting paths for post-capitalist communication we need in the growing era of social backdown.

It’s not only “tech” – it’s social trust infrastructure. A common is not only software; it’s the culture of cooperation that surrounds it, shared values, mutual aid, and relational ethics, you can’t “code” trust into hardware, as the last decade of #blockchain and #AI mess proves. Smart contracts failed to make people honest; they just automated mistrust, it’s on going #geekproblem blindness we need to be working to compost.

What works, the resilience, comes from people, not algorithms. Through frameworks like the #4opens: open data, open code, open standards, open process. We can build transparency and accountability into the social layer of the network. Trust is a practice, not a protocol #KISS

We need a future that’s better, not just less bad. The #deathcult story – neoliberalism’s great myth – says “there is no alternative.” Alt tech is the alternative, working proof that cooperation scales, that people build shared infrastructure without extraction and less coercion. Look at LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Linux, or the #Fediverse, all imperfect, collaborative systems built on trust, not profit. They are real-world examples of how collective will outperform the normal deadened paths of corporate hierarchy.

Alt tech gives us believable hope, which is the only real antidote to despair and apathy. The ground for grassroots power is in pushing change and challenge. If the liberal state and #dotcons won’t reform, we need to be building parallel structures that work differently.
Projects like the #OGB (Open Governance Body) experiment with federated, transparent decision-making. The #OMN builds tools to connect grassroots media in trust networks, bypassing gatekeepers entirely. Together they form a scaffolding of a working commons, capable of hosting culture, not only control.

Healing the social media wound? We need to compost the lie of #dotcons which spent the last 20 years turning us into consumers and outrage machines. The shovel we need is affinity groups rebuilding social tech around self-governance, interoperability, and most importantly trust to reclaim the human side of the internet. Imagine the world different, feeds that empower communities, not advertisers, tools that nurture relationships, not metrics, platforms that amplify context, not conflict.

This is the work of making the internet human again, working together on the path of alt tech matters because it’s not about gadgets; it’s about freedom, community, and survival. It’s our path to remembering that the #openweb, like the Earth itself, belongs to everyone, or it belongs to no one. And every time we build a shared tool, or hold open a door, we remind the world that cooperation is not naïve, it’s our oldest #KISS technology.

A cross-cultural conversation on this subject

UPDATE: I haven’t touched on two other #4opens projects here, so let’s tap them at the end: #Nostr is a “me-too” project stuck in the #geekproblem loop, it won’t go anywhere until it learns to value community as a building block. #Bluesky, on the other hand, is already drifting into the hands of VC-funded #fluffy elitists who turn every commons into a brand. It’s a very likely a dead-end for real change or challenge, which is why the #mainstreaming #blocking #NGO and #fashionista crowds flock to it.

UPDATE 02: Digesting the comments. For the past 10,000 years of agriculture, 500+ years of Euro-colonialism, 200+ years of #capitalism, and 95 years of #neoliberalism (45 officially declared as such), the #nastyfew practicing control through production have dominated everyone else. Capitalism, as described in Capital, grew wherever it could. By the late 19th century, labour organised and fought back. Social democracy transformed the capitalist state so effectively that capitalist development stalled by the 1930s.

The response? A reorganisation of capital, using anti-communism as its rallying cry (WWII, NATO, Korea, Vietnam) to defeat social democracy and retake control of the state. By the 1980s, “they” felt secure enough to brand reform itself as a product: #Neoliberalism. I’m simplifying, of course – this is for the #hashtagStory outreach, so it can become a #KISS tool people can actually use. Clarifications and deeper dives you can find in the comments 🙂

Now, about this idea that “capitalism told us we’re isolated individuals competing to survive.” It’s partly true, but not in the way people think. Capitalism depends on interdependence, we work together to produce, but in a way that isolates us socially and politically. That’s the contradiction: interdependence turned into alienation. It’s the mess in our heads that recreates these bad social structures, the inner factory of control. That’s what we have to compost.

In the end, it’s not just social control, it’s social destruction. As we rush deeper into #climatechaos and the global hard-right turn, it’s clearer than ever: the ideology of separation keeps power safe and people powerless. I know this isn’t #mainstreaming liberal logic, that’s the point. We have to think differently.

And for context, I’m not speaking from the sidelines – I’ve got an MA in politics and 30 years of hands-on work in grassroots #openweb tech. Isolation is social control, see #stupidindividualism. Let’s keep this grounded and not turn it into trolling, yeah?

The #AI bubble might be nastier than the Dot.com crash

The path the #mainstreaming in tech is taking is clear. #AI is fashion, the valuations are absurd, the cost structures unsustainable, and the hype cycle feels like it’s already outpacing reality.

We’ve been here before, dot.com déjà vu. The #dotcons bubble of 2000 was built on fake demand and fantasy valuations. Venture capital flooded into half-baked platforms that promised to “reinvent” everything, while the effect was to hollow out and enclose the native #openweb. When the bubble burst, it wasn’t just investors who lost, the damage was social, cultural, and technological, it’s the mess we are in today.

The AI bubble, 2025 edition, we’re watching the same movie again, only bigger and nastier. This time, the hype engine is driven by press releases and corporate lobbying, amplified by blinded compliant media desperate to see the next miracle story. Every company claims they’re solving “the biggest problem” with AI. But lift the lid, the rhetoric, and what remains? Business models that don’t add value, expensive wrappers around existing tools. Unsustainable costs – GPU farms burning cash and carbon in equal measure. Speculation over substance, #nastyfew investors betting on domination rather than usefulness.

Why this round may be worse, at least the #dotcons bubble left some infrastructure we could build on: fibre, hosting, and the spread of the web itself. The #AI bubble looks different, as it centralises power even further in the hands of a few #dotcons. Accelerates #climatechaos through energy-intensive training runs and datacentre inflation. It undermines our flawed democracies, trust in media and knowledge with floods of synthetic content.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e1Tqc_rWeQ

The ending to this video is a shocker, but not unsepreising when you look at the context of the video.

Instead of building open, federated, useful tools, we’re watching another round of #techshit enclosure, hype and money funnelling into projects that can’t last, but which will leave more #techshit scorched-earth legacy when they collapse. The #dotcons crash was messy, the AI crash could be toxic.

What can people do to walk away from this mess? How do you help with the #OMN and #4opens? The AI bubble shows what happens when tech is built on the normal hype, enclosure, and extraction on the #dotcons path. The #OMN is the opposite of this. It’s about building trust-based, federated networks where media, knowledge, and tools aren’t just another asset class to be bought and sold. The #4opens are the activist #FOSS antidote to bubble logic:

Open Data – No black boxes. If #AI is going to be part of any future, the training data, biases, and methods must be transparent, not locked up by Google, OpenAI, or Microsoft.

Open Code – Instead of closed, centralised data sets and platforms that extract rent, we need free/libre code anyone can run, fork, and improve.

Open Standards – The current AI mess is about silos and monopolies. Federated standards (like ActivityPub for social) are how we work to keep diversity alive and break enclosure.

Open Process – The opposite of corporate secrecy and hype. Decisions need to be made in the open, accountable to communities, not hidden boardrooms or PR cycles.

The #AI bubble is the normal every day #deathcult logic of the #dotcons playing out again: extract, enclose, collapse, repeat. The #OMN and #4opens give us a way to compost this mess into something more fertile. From enclosure → to federation. From secrecy → to openness. From hype cycles → to slow, messy, sustainable growth.

If we don’t actively build and defend this needed native path, we’ll be left cleaning up another round of collapse, only this time with more concentration of power, more environmental damage, and a deeper erosion of trust. The choice is simple: do we keep betting on bubbles, or do we build commons?

And the path is #KISS, so people please don’t be a prat about this, thanks.

YouTube and the #deathcult of “Independent” Media

Over the last ten years, we’ve all been spending more and more time on #YouTube. And maybe you’ve noticed something strange: many of the channels you once thought of as independent are no longer independent at all. They’ve been quietly bought up by private equity firms with billions in backing from SoftBank, Amazon, Disney, Goldman Sachs, Blackstone – the usual #mainstreaming priests of the #deathcult.

Channels like Task & Purpose, Vice, Veritasium, Donut Media, Simple History, Economics Explained, The Drive, and History Hit are already part of the buyout wave. Some of the biggest names in our worship of “creator culture” – CocoMelon, Colin and Samir, The Theorists, Dude Perfect – too. And that’s just the ones who admitted it. There’s no law requiring disclosure.

Capitalism has a logic, that creators are commodities. “Independent” YouTubers once worked on tiny budgets – a camera, editing software, a couple of friends – to reach millions. They were messy, risky, sometimes radical. Capital sees something else: predictable cashflow, brand expansion, safe investment. But these operations are fragile. They depend on one platform (#YouTube), one personality, and an algorithm that can erase a career overnight. Normally, this risk would scare off capitalists. But with $12 trillion sloshing around private equity in the US alone, they’ve run out of businesses to buy. YouTube channels are the new frontier.

This is how grasping control kills creativity, when capitalism takes over, the overhead explodes. Analysts, strategists, managers, lawyers all need their cut. That means: more ads, more sponsorships, more merch, safer, algorithm-friendly content, the same formula cloned across every channel in the for profit portfolio. This “roll-up” logic flattens everything into old-school TV. Risk disappears, the spark that made YouTube compelling at first is smothered by business strategy. We’re already seeing it with channels like Veritasium, slowly shifting away from Derek Muller to reduce “keyman risk.” Once a personality becomes a liability, the accountants start grooming replacements.

Old school #traditionalmedia tried to counter te first wave of #dotcons social media by throwing money at “new media” outfits like Vice, Buzzfeed, Mashable, and Vox. They burned cash, collapsed, and left nothing but layoffs. The new approach is simpler: don’t build, just buy. Disney doesn’t need to grow the next Vice; it just needs to buy a handful of YouTube channels and tell shareholders it’s “ready for the future.”

The same #deathcult logic applies to this, appease shareholders first, audiences last. The cost is paid by viewers, the result for us – #dotcons friendly content becomes blander and safer, sponsorships dominate, but direct support (merch, memberships) dries up, because who wants to fund faceless #nastyfew agendas? “Creators” burn out, and vanish, replaced by interchangeable hosts or locked down with non-compete contracts. It’s the industrialisation of #fashionista “independent culture”.

There is a history to this, and #openweb parallels, we’ve seen this story before, in the 90s, independent radio stations were bought out by Clear Channel, homogenising the airwaves. In the 2000s, blogs were enclosed by Facebook, Google, and Twitter, killing off messy but vibrant grassroots media. Even movements like Occupy or Extinction Rebellion felt the same pressures: a burst of openness and creativity, followed by co-option, #NGO capture, and fragmentation under managed dissent. The lesson is always the same: once capital steps in, the mess is tidied away, and any possibility of change and challenge dies.

I have seen this on the #dotcons platforms we use as backups and hook for the #openweb native projects, our visionontv YouTube loses a video or two every month to not advertising friendly, copyright strike for clear fair use etc.

The #OMN Lesson, YouTube is repeating the same pattern we’ve seen across the #closedweb: a few years of openness and experimentation, followed by enclosure, consolidation, and financialisation. Capitalism cannot tolerate risk, it cannot tolerate diversity, it needs control, predictability, and growth at all costs. And that is the death of any real grassroots media.

The #OMN path is the opposite. We need federated, messy, trust-based networks where media is not just another asset class. Media must be inherently open – created, shared, and remixed under the #4opens. If we don’t build and defend this, the future of online culture is already sold out.

Mess and more mess, “diversity”

We need to look at our paths and current the controversy in “diversity” in our #deathcult worship, to see the need to compost the current mess. The problem with “pushing diversity” isn’t diversity itself. That’s fine – essential, even. The problem lies in the ideology shaping the push.

Much of it comes from #mainstreaming progressive liberalism, which operates inside the logic of the deathcult. It reduces diversity to a checklist, a branding exercise, a way to appear “inclusive” while leaving power untouched. This is not liberation, it’s management.

When we enter into these spaces, conversations about diversity collapse into the same-old mess: the mixing of right and left framings, suspicion on all sides, endless accusations. Instead of solidarity, we end up with #blocking. Instead of building, we burn out. The is no good outcome.

This is the normal worship of the #deathcult, the endless loop of optics and control, where movements fracture and collectives suffocate with “diversity strategies” that have no relation to grassroots realities.

The path as ever is compost. Take the mess – the liberal tokenism, the reactionary backlash, the burnout – and compost it into something alive. Composting means, returning to grassroots voices, not NGO checklists, seeing diversity as lived struggle, not branding. Grounding it in #4opens, where openness makes co-option harder, to turn toxic blocks into fertile soil for collective growth

The #OMN path is simple: it’s not about ticking boxes or replicating liberal #NGO frameworks. It’s about federated, messy collaboration that actually works. Diversity is not a corporate slogan. It’s the lived complexity of struggle. If we can compost the deathcult ideology that poisons it, diversity becomes strength rather than a management tool.

The question is, are we willing to compost the liberal mess, or do we let it keep rotting movements from the inside?

From “Woke” Capital to MAGA Capital – A Case Study

In the US, every presidential election is sold to us as a transformation of the nation. The chattering class pundits and their #fashionista followers tell us: a new people have been elected alongside a new government. Obama, Trump, Biden, each framed as a seismic cultural shift. But if you care to look, the reality is different: turnout is low, margins slim, the electoral college dulls change. What’s hyped as a national rebirth is just a reshuffling of the same #deathcult mess.

Still, perception matters. After Trump’s re-election, the “zeitgeist shift” rippled through politics and corporate boardrooms. Suddenly, dozens of corporations rolled back their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (#DEI) programs. Woke capital simply pivoted into #MAGA capital.

Liberal woke capital was about projecting inclusion as market expansion: Pride logos in June. Minorities cast in blockbuster films. “Inclusive” ad campaigns. It looked progressive, but it was always about markets: new demographics = new customers. Sometimes the invisible hand holds a rainbow flag.

MAGA Capital, in contrast, is about disciplining workers and pleasing investors. It’s about showing loyalty to the strongman, not customers. DEI didn’t collapse because “the people rejected it.” CEOs saw an opening: align with Trump, roll back diversity, keep profits flowing.

The firings of Colbert and Kimmel crystallized this shift. Networks needed mergers approved. “Ratings” were the excuse, but raw political loyalty was the reality. This is crony capitalism: the stockholder and the strongman aligning. Trump, the fake businessman from TV, borrows legitimacy from profits and ratings, hiding authoritarianism in smoke and mirrors “democracy”. This is the logic of the #deathcult: all values are disposable, as long as accumulation continues.

Lessons for the #OMN path. The shift from Woke to MAGA shows how fragile diversity is when it’s managed as a brand. It’s reversible, hollow, and always subordinated to capital. For the #OMN and the #openweb reboot, the lesson is simple: Don’t outsource diversity to branding exercises. Don’t confuse representation under capitalism with liberation. Don’t build systems where power pivots on a corporate whim. Instead, compost the mess. Root diversity in lived struggle. Anchor it in the #4opens so co-option is harder and collaboration is resilient.

What should be more obvious is that capital, the #nastyfew, its servants, doesn’t care about values, only accumulation. If we want diversity, inclusion, and justice to be real, we have to build them outside the #deathcult logic, in federated, grassroots spaces that don’t bend every time the political wind shifts.

The question remains: will we keep chasing the mess of spectacle – Woke vs. MAGA, or will we compost it and build something more rooted, messy, and alive #KISS

“Your Party” and the Fluffy/Spiky debate – a working path

A wider view of this https://nathanakehurst.medium.com/whose-party-ce23a8099624

Fluffy side: cautious, slow-moving, grounded in “keeping the peace” and managing optics. Classic problem: avoidance of conflict means bottlenecking decisions, blocking energy, and trying to centralise control, so things don’t blow up. Spiky side: impatient, direct, “get it done” energy. Spikiness pushes things forward, but often burns bridges, creating splits and mistrust. Neither path alone works – one stalls out, the other fragments. Their clash in the UK “Your Party”, just tore apart what was an opening for a broad left #mainstreaming alternative which we do need.

There are lessons here for horizontal/grassroots paths, a big one is that centralisation kills: When “leadership” becomes bottlenecked around personalities (Corbyn as “elder statesman”, Sultana as “young firebrand”), it reproduces the same control problems we see everywhere – #NGO capture, careerist gatekeeping, etc. Energy without mediation burns out: Spiky approaches are essential (they break inertia), but without social glue and open processes, the movement shatters.

Sadly, it’s looking like the political vacuum, is back. The 700,000 people who signed up are proof that there is real mass desire for something beyond the #deathcult #mainstreaming. But they’re now “homeless” – with no trustworthy structures to plug into. That vacuum will either be filled by opportunists (careerists, NGOs, “#fashernista”), or open the path for something like the #OMN: messy, federated, not centralised around personalities. And/Or the Green Party (this needs a separate post).

Focusing on the grassroots path I have been working on: this is exactly why the #OMN and #openweb reboot needs balance, so the signal-to-noise ratio can stay healthy. Otherwise, we just mirror the left’s long history of splits. What it means for the fluffy/spiky debate: The “Your Party” implosion shows us:

You can’t fix spiky by being fluffy. The soft style just frustrated allies and deepened mistrust.

You can’t replace fluffy with spiky.

The only path forward is process, not personality. That’s where horizontal projects like the #OMN can work – by creating open, transparent, mediated structures that don’t depend on charismatic individuals at the centre.

For the #openweb reboot, this bad moment is actually what we are working to fix. It shows how much energy there is (hundreds of thousands signing up). It shows the cost of control blindness. Likewise, it creates urgency for native governance paths and experiments in the #fediverse and beyond – where messy affinity-based groups, guided by the #4opens, can provide a home that doesn’t implode around personality clashes.

The question now is who can see the need for the practical mediation layer of the #OMN, is designed to bridge – not abstract theory – it’s the path that makes messy, spiky, fluffy humans work together without blowing everything up. For the #OMN and #openweb reboot, the answer isn’t “less conflict” or “more central leadership,” but better mediation and horizontal process, so collective energy isn’t wasted on repeating the same old splits.

What we are the seeing is the limits of #fashionista and #geekproblem control blindness.

How do we deal with this generation of people – formed by #neoliberalism, #dotcons, #mainstreaming, #stupidindividualism – when what’s needed is collective change and challenge?

The generation of the last 40 years of “There is no alternative” (Thatcher → Blair → Sunak/Starmer) produced passivity and cynicism. #Dotcons capture: people live inside algorithmic bubbles, shaped for consumption, not collaboration. This is the era of individualism as common sense: many can’t even imagine “the collective” except as a threat. We now face naked, fear + distraction: #climatechaos, wars, economic precarity → endless doomscrolling instead of agency. And this is why movements implode: the raw material (people) have been warped by the #deathcult.

What we can work with, even in this mess, people still show hunger for meaning (why 700,000 signed up for Corbyn–Sultana’s thing). Anger at the #nastyfew elitists (but it often gets channelled rightwards – Farage, Trump, Reform, conspiracies).

There are moments of solidarity (mutual aid, Palestine protests, climate camps). Skill fragments (#geekproblem energy, activist culture, DIY practice – but siloed). We don’t start from zero – we start from these contradictions.

Practical paths for dealing with this generation is in part about: Break the spell by expose #mainstreaming as a control system, using simple, repeatable stories (hashtags, memes, metaphors like composting/shovels) to make the invisible visible.

Then the path, affinity first, not mass. Don’t try to herd 700,000 people. Start with small, trust-based circles that actually work. Show results, not rhetoric. This attracts people who are sick of endless talking shops. Compost the conflict, instead of suppressing spiky energy (which turns toxic), build mediation layers, so conflict gets processed into growth. This prevents the inevitable splits from killing projects before they start.

We need working, visible alternatives, things people can touch: #OMN publishing hubs, #fediverse tools, radical media gardens. Each working piece is a counter-spell against “there is no alternative.” This is about reframing success and stop only measuring change in electoral wins or #NGO funding circles. We need to measure it in resilient collectives, working infrastructure, and shifts in common sense.

The challenge we need to compost, is that, the current generation has been trained in #stupidindividualism. What we need to learn is you cannot beat that as individuals, the only path is to recreate collectives – messy, organic, trust-based – where people can unlearn the #deathcult through practice. That’s why #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback matter: they’re not just tools, they’re containers for relearning collective life.

The #dotcons drained the VC swamp and now guzzle from the mainstream corporate socialism

In the USA #techshit mess, #OpenAI is busy wrapping itself in the stars and stripes, pushing the fantasy of “democratic AI” while the democracy fig leaf is withering. This isn’t democracy – it’s branding. It’s the normal Silicon Valley laundering greed through the American imperialism.

The #nastyfew, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Masayoshi Son, and the Saudis will do fine. They’ll gorge on taxpayer, subsides, pouring billions down the drain, just like the political as normal boondoggles – the useless littoral ships, the Foxconn ghost factory. It’s all the same scam: shovel public money into private pockets, call it progress, leave wreckage behind.

This is the everyday #deathcult at work. The language of freedom and democracy as always been hollow, with the smoke and mirrors hiding corporate profit motives, sprayed in red, white, and blue gloss. They, the #nastyfew and their acolytes, were never building tools for people, they’re entrenching power, exporting Silicon Valley’s #dotcons extraction model under state sanction.

The rest of us? We get the surveillance, the climate wreckage, the bill. The only thing “democratic” about this current #AI path is how widely the costs will be socialized while the profits remain privatized.

Pushing back AI hype and building better futures

What we don’t need is more Silicon Valley scams draped in flags. We don’t need “democratic AI” pushing billionaire control. What we do need is a living alternative: like the #OMN path.

The #OpenMediaNetwork isn’t built on subsidies for the #nastyfew, it’s built on trust, transparency, and tools for the many. It’s messy, human, and alive, rejecting the hollow language of branding and growing on the grounded: #4opens for media, code, governance, and community.

The #OMN path says: we don’t wait for corporations to drip-feed us “freedom” while chaining us with surveillance. We build our own networks. We create media that resists capture. We code grassroots protocols that put groups first, not extractive markets. We reclaim the #openweb as commons, not as the current shackled slave plantation.

This is the real “democracy” they are terrified about, and why they keep pushing their stage-managed branding “democracy” exercise. We need instead people creating together, federating, refusing capture, building resilience in the cracks of the failing empire. The #deathcult is extraction, distraction, and decay. The #OMN is life, connection, and power in our hands. The choice is simple. Which side are you on?

The #dotcons sell us lies.
Shiny apps. Smooth words. Addictive feeds.
It’s branded corporate greed wrapped in a digital addiction –
the drug of distraction, sold to us as “connection.”

The #nastyfew billionaires gorge.
They own the servers, the wires, the algorithms.
They gorge on our clicks, our labour, our lives.
And the rest of us pay.

We pay in surveillance.
We pay in broken trust.
We pay in climate wreckage,
while their jets and data centres burn the sky.
The bill is dumped in our laps.
That’s the #deathcult we all worship.

But we have a choice.
If we choose a different path,
we don’t need their tools.
We don’t need their lies.
We don’t need their cages.

We build our own paths.
Messy, raw, imperfect – but ours.
That’s the #4opens. That’s the #OMN path.

Not for the market. For the people.
Not top-down. Ground-up.
Group-first. Trust-first. Messy, real, alive.

This is democracy they cannot script.
This is media they cannot buy.
This is the #openweb commons,
we create together, not consume alone.

The choice is simple.
Kneel to the #dotcons.
Or rise up, and rebuild the #openweb.