Tag: nastyfew

Pushing back AI hype and building better futures

This week, Dr. Emily M. Bender (University of Washington), co-author of The AI Con, delivered a much-needed reality check in Oxford, cutting through the fog of #AI PR myths and techno-dystopian smoke. In The Q&A by Professor Catherine Pope (Nuffield Dept. of Primary Care), the conversation explored how AI is being used not to elevate us, but to devalue human creativity, justify surveillance, and concentrate wealth and power in the bands of the #nastyfew

This wasn’t the normal breathless “future of work” keynote. It was a call to arms about the AI Con – What Are We Really Being Sold? Dr. Bender, known for coining the term stochastic parrot, highlights how AI hype isn’t just noise – it’s a strategy, to push unregulated, underperforming, resource-hungry technologies into every part of society. It turns complex problems into opportunities to extract data, deskill more workers, and justify more austerity.

We’re not being sold intelligence, we’re being sold plagiarism machines that mimic but don’t understand, synthetic text extruders trained to sound right, but to often hallucinate. Mathy-maths cloaked in prestige, built on broken benchmarks like the Turing Test – long since reduced to a measure of gullibility.

Anthropomorphism by design, responsibility by none, is insidious that AI systems are designed to mimic humanity. They pull users in through anthropomorphism, but when something goes wrong, no one is held responsible. Not the engineers, not the companies, not the funders. Just the user caught in the middle. As Dr. Bender and others have pointed out, there’s no “intelligence” in AI, just statistics, training data, and the motives of those who built it.

What’s Lost in the Hype? 

“We used to do language translation better with fewer resources.”
“Cloud computing is a lie, it’s just someone else’s server burning through energy and water.”

These are the quiet truths ignored by AI boosterism. Dr. Bender laid bare the ecological, cognitive, and political costs:

Corruption pushing ecological waste: AI training and cloud infrastructure depend on water, energy, and mining—routed not where they’re sustainable, but where regulation is weak.

Erosion of trust: Models trained to sound authoritative spread confident falsehoods, degrading public discourse.

Security risks: Code generation tools are notoriously lax, riddled with hallucinations and vulnerabilities.

Dehumanisation of labour: AI doesn't replace bad jobs with good ones, it turns good work into mechanical “oversight” roles, where humans are paid to babysit broken systems.

And in health and care, where these technologies are increasingly being pushed, the stakes are life, dignity, and wellbeing.

What I have personal found is that Oxford is feeding its brightest minds into AI. As institutions bend to corporate funding and hype cycles, critique becomes harder, not easier. But critique is essential. This is a fight about who benefits, and who bears the cost.

Governance, the mess of AI tech-fix paths

Like the Luddites of the 19th century, we’re not against machines, we’re against machines used against us. The Luddites knew that the issue wasn’t the loom, it was who owned the loom. That’s why we need more conversations like this. Not just about what AI is, but about what kind of society we want. And more importantly, who gets to decide.

What could work on these tech pats is:

  • Smaller, dumber, domain-specific models where needed.
  • Open standards, not closed corporate APIs.
  • Tech built with consent, accountability, and ecological limits.
  • A refusal to let “innovation” be an excuse to undermine public infrastructure.

Above all, we need to centre people, not profit, humility, not hype. Very important not to be a prat about this.

#Oxford

This is what the #dotcons, control, is doing with the #AI mess. to us.

America was always violent -You likely just have not noticed

The thing most liberals forget is that Americans are a notoriously politically violent bunch. From the Boston Tea Party to armed labour uprisings, from the Black Panthers to white vigilantes, from state crackdowns to citizen riots – the American story has always been soaked in political violence, the “land of the free” has enforced its freedom with fists, guns, and fire.

But over the last 40–50 years, all that was deliberately erased, rewritten, smoothed over, sold back as Disney-branded rebellion or CNN documentary tragedy. Out of sight, out of mind, out of options. That was the bipartisan strategy from Reagan to Clinton, Bush to Obama. Not to resolve pressure, but to suppress it.

The return of reality, is what we’re seeing now, this isn’t some “unprecedented crisis.” It’s a return to form. It’s the American normal that elitists have been desperately trying to keep hidden under plastic for decades. The only thing that’s changed is this: There’s no longer any outlet for the pressure, no trusted media, no real opposition party, no economic ladder, no commons to gather in, just debt, anxiety, and screens.

What now shocks the political class isn’t the chaos, it’s that there’s no release valve except their own collapse. They’re not afraid of the people rising up, They’re afraid that the state will be held accountable, and lose.

We were at this moment before in the USA, when the new deal was a white flag, let’s go back for a moment, FDR’s “New Deal” wasn’t a gift, It was a surrender, after 50 years of exploitation by the robber barons and their cronies, the country was on the brink. Labour revolts, communist organizing, anarchist movements, real threats to the state, were everywhere. FDR was smart enough to see the writing on the wall. The New Deal was a bargain: “Here’s a little back. Don’t take the rest.” It worked, temporarily. But only because people still had leverage.

Now? Every President since has mostly just tried to keep the lid on, offering less and less in return, and weaponizing the “culture war” as a distraction. By the Clinton era, the deal was done.

Deregulate the economy.

Outsource everything.

Privatize everything else.

Turn politics into a spectacle.

Keep the pressure building—but never release it.

And now here we are, in a real mess, with a poisoned society from 40 years of #deathcult worship, the political class are now standing naked before the onrushing #climatechaos and social break down, stripped of their sacred robes.

  • Spiritual poison: stripped rituals, atomized families, forgotten connections.
  • Social poison: movements fractured, solidarities lost to infighting.
  • Civic poison: institutions hollowed out, education turned to obedience training.
  • Media poison: truth for sale, journalism devalued, platforms turned to weapons.
  • Cultural poison: every feeling a product, every hope a commodity, every act of care reduced to an app.

This should worry the #nastyfew who are propping up this political class. We, the people, are still numbed, distracted, transactioned, algorithmically isolated, so still we can barely even imagine a world otherwise. And still the pressure builds, the worst mistake they’ve made is believing they can just keep doing this, that there are no consequences, that people will always submit if fed enough Netflix, fentanyl, and Uber Eats.

But history doesn’t work that way, when a government wages war on its people… Eventually, it loses, not because the people are strong, but because the government is brittle. The lie of modern technocratic rule is that you can govern without trust, coerce without violence, suppress without blowback. That myth has shattered now, collapse is a trajectory, not a theory.

So what now? We need to rebuilding beyond collapse. This is where our work comes in. #OMN, #indymediaback, the #openweb they’re not just nice ideas, they’re survival infrastructures. We can’t wait for a revolution that will never be televised or appear in our algorithmic feeds. We can’t expect institutions to reform themselves. We need:

Public spaces without paywalls

Media systems without gatekeepers

Tech that serves people, not platforms

Governance that comes from below, not above

This isn’t just political, it’s existential. Either we rebuild from the rubble of this poisoned world, or we get buried beneath it.

The choice isn’t “radicalism” or “reform.”
It’s resistance or thoughtlessness.
Collapse or commons.

You decide.

The current mainstreaming’s greatest sin is thoughtlessness

Capitalism is a hostage situation -Not an economy

Our current #mainstreaming path of paywalls stacked on paywalls isn’t life, it’s a trap, we need a way out. In our everyday lives, we’ve come to accept the absurd:

  • You pay to eat food grown on land you don’t own,
  • Pay to sleep under a roof that someone profits from,
  • Pay to drink water privatized by corporations,
  • Pay to breathe, because the air is poisoned by industries that sell you both the problem and the solution.

And if you miss a payment? Game over (inspired by). That’s not a functioning economy, it’s not freedom, it’s a hostage situation, where every basic human need is held behind a transactional barrier, and the meter is always running.

This #deathcult is late capitalism: an endless stack of paywalls enclosing what used to be public, shared, and free. It isn’t just about money, it’s about control, dependency, and isolation. It’s a system that engineers artificial scarcity, so a #nastyfew can profit while the many just try to survive.

But it wasn’t always like this, for most of human history, people lived within commons-based paths, where land was collectively stewarded, food was grown and shared within communities, tools and knowledge were passed down, not patented and governance was often local and participatory.

The last 200 years of “common sense” capitalism is an enclosure of these commons, first the physical ones (land, water, food), and now the digital and social ones (communication, culture, identity). The #openweb, like the open land before it, is being fenced off. Platform by platform. App by app. Cookie banner by paywall.

This enclosure now defines much of our tech infrastructure, every scroll, click, and share is now mediated by profit-driven platforms. Even activism – once vibrant and messy – is being swallowed by slick interfaces and the same throttled feeds. Resistance is filtered, shadowbanned, deboosted, and pushed to monetize. And “our” #NGOs fighting platform power… are doing so on those same platforms.

It’s an absurdity, and worse: it’s a trap. We need alternatives, real ones. We’re not going to “ethics workshop” our way out of this. We need to rebuild the tools of everyday life – economically, digitally, socially – from the grassroots up.

Commons-based systems, let’s turn some “common sense” on it head, instead of private ownership: stewardship. Instead of scarcity: abundance through sharing. This is where projects, like The Open Media Network (#OMN) come in as a practical framework for grassroots media infrastructure:

Built on the #4opens: open data, source, standards, and governance.

Designed to decentralize publishing, and return control to local communities.

Uses both client-server and P2P bridges for accessibility and resilience.

Encourages trust-based networks over extractive platforms.

OMN is not just theory, it’s active code, messy dev, and practical tools for people to tell their own stories, host their own content, and build alternative knowledge systems outside corporate media. These technologies make community hosting the default – not the exception. They reduce reliance on fragile or compromised #dotcons infrastructure. They’re imperfect, but they’re a step out of the enclosure.

The point isn’t just tech, It’s power, capitalism doesn’t just gate resources. It enforces relationships of power. That’s why rebuilding tech without addressing governance, ownership, and access won’t get us far. The #geekproblem is real: tech that nobody can use isn’t liberation, it’s just another dead-end.

The alternative? Keep it #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), prioritize social usability over technical elegance, build bridges, not silos, return to shared ownership and open processes. Capitalism is a hostage situation, but we can walk out the door – if we build the exit together.

You’re not powerless, and this isn’t about purity or escape. It’s about building real infrastructure for real life, so when the capitalist system keeps crumbling (as it will), we’re not left scrambling. We’ll already be living differently.

#OMN #MakingHistory #4opens #openweb #p2p #indymediaback #geekproblem #commons #decentralize #cooperative #foss #degrowth #resilience

UPDATE the seed of this post was from a toot, but can’t find the original to link to due to the #UX of mastodon updating and no functioning search on my instance to find history, sorry, add in comments if you find the original. Updated

Where’s the Resistance to Algorithmic Monopolies?

The big question need to be highlighted: where will pressure for meaningful regulation of #dotcons algorithmic monopolies actually come from?

Right now, it’s hard to see. Lawmakers generally have a poor grasp of the real problems, decades behind on both the tech and its corrosive social consequences. Most legislation we get is either pre-packaged by lobbyists from the #nastyfew controlled platforms causing the harm, or superficial and narrow, #fashionista focus on headline optics like “online harms” or “child safety,” instead of addressing the deeper crisis of algorithmic control, attention addiction, and social fragmentation for control.

Even worse, and this needs to be said loudly, the civil society institutions that should be resisting this mess are captured. Charities, #NGOs, media orgs, #geekproblem digital rights groups. Whether for funding, publicity, or simple convenience, they’ve tied their missions to the very tools they should be questioning. Rather than building alternatives or even naming the deeper problems, they instead focus on “using platforms better” or “more ethically”, which only serves to legitimise the #techshit they should be dismantling for composted.

This is classic #mainstreaming. It’s how radical energy gets drained, redirected, and eventually used to feed the system it once opposed. Meanwhile, into the vacuum of real critique and action steps, conspiracy-driven nonsense and cynical populism to feed the cycle.

This is why grassroots and native #openweb spaces like the #Fediverse matter, not just as “alternatives” but as active resistance. They are places where we can build different logics, embed different values, and avoid replicating the same centralising, manipulative dynamics.

It’s also why we have to defend these spaces, especially when they’re messy or imperfect. Because if we don’t build and protect something better, we’ll be left with a fight where even the so-called opposition is simply more of the same problem.

Composting the EU Tech Mess: From #NLnet to #Eurostack

First step: Stop being a prat

We have strong passive #blocking forces stopping the real change and challenge we need before we have any hope of changing the world, thus we as a community have to change our stance towards this blocking. And the first step – the most important one – is painfully simple: Stop being a prat.

That means:

  • Stop pretending you don’t understand the stakes.
  • Stop making perfect the enemy of good.
  • Stop whining about how broken things are while refusing to touch the tools that exist.
  • Stop treating radical, working alternatives like they’re someone else’s hobby project.
  • Stop waiting for someone else to do it.

You don’t need a degree in political science or coding, or anything to see what’s happening, from floods and fascists to boat evictions and mass precarity. You don’t need permission from a foundation or a blue tick to take part, you don’t need a five-year strategy. Simple, you just need to stop being a prat, and start doing, so, what does “not being a prat” look like?

  • Instead of doomscrolling, publish one thing that matters using #OMN tools or paths.
  • Instead of performative politics, help document what’s actually happening around you in a #4opens way.
  • Instead of building personal brands, build open #Fediverse infrastructure that your community can use.
  • Instead of hiding behind cynicism, show up and collaborate – messily, imperfectly is fine, just try not to be a prat.

Why it matters, because the #nastyfew people seizing power right now, from JD Vance to the canal eviction bureaucrats, aren’t being prats. They’re serious about building institutions to shape futures. The tragedy is that our side, the ones with the heart, the vision, the history, are too often busy being clever, passive, cool, and precious, kinda like prats….

The first revolutionary act in the 2020s isn’t heroic, it’s just showing up, not being a prat, and doing the obvious things, together. This is simple, most importantly #KISS please don’t be a prat about this, thanks.

The #mainstreaming is talking about the #deathcult – So why are you still waiting?

The new right weaponizing culture: The right goes post-liberal

Let’s have a look at an example of the new mess we’re facing: JD Vance – author, venture capitalist, convert Catholic, and now Vice President. He’s not a Reaganite libertarian, nor a traditional conservative. Instead, Vance represents something more dangerous: a dogmatic ideology, born in the boardrooms of tech billionaires and the seminaries of Catholicism, forged on in the #dotcons, and now pushing American politics into very dark territory.

This isn’t politics as usual. It’s not even populism any more. While there’s grifting (of course) and plenty of weirdness to laugh at, Vance and his fellow travellers are deadly serious. They are actively wielding state power – not to protect liberal values, but to bury them. They’ve declared the Enlightenment dead. The compromise that held Western democracies together for centuries? Thrown out. In its place, they want to sack the referee and replace him with a priest, a general, and a patriarch. All under the rallying cry of “Culture in Crisis.”

Vance’s origin myth is the breakdown of the American family, as told through Hillbilly Elegy – addiction, poverty, and social collapse in the white working class. That story pushed him through the Thiel-funded ranks of the #techbro elitists. But he didn’t stop at diagnosis, the next step is to legislate culture, to grasp state power and use it to impose the narrow vision of the #nastyfew onto everyone else.

This isn’t nostalgia and posturing any more. This is a fully operational political project, rooted in religion, nationalism, and family. It’s about dismantling the old #mainstreaming and replacing it with a fortress ideology. Neutrality in courts and bureaucracy? Gone. Education? To be weaponised. History? To be rewritten. Opponents? To be punished. This is a hard right revolution, bulldozing the old order as a prerequisite for building the new. “The System Is the Enemy.” Libertarian economics are dismissed as rootless; personal liberty as decadent. Academia, journalism, and law are painted as captured by postmodern “wokeism”, a hegemonic structure that must be ripped out like a tumour.

This isn’t rhetorical. It’s actionable. Seize the Ford Foundation’s assets. Fire the civil service. Override the courts. Vance quotes Andrew Jackson: “The Chief Justice has made his ruling; now let him enforce it.” This is a revolution, not of the people, but for the #nastyfew. At its heart is a revival of ethno-nationalism. Where American identity once leaned on shared civic values, not shared blood, they now champion a mythic “homeland” of “legacy Americans” and cemetery plots. A culture you must inherit to belong. Don’t have children? You’re a “childless cat lady”, a punchline and a pariah. Public servant without offspring? Then you have “no commitment to the future.” It’s an ideological border wall: to belong, you must believe in the right God, live in a traditional family, and descend from the right people. Everyone else? Suspect, and/or disposable.

This isn’t simple reactionary, it’s counter-Enlightenment. The appeal is clear: it speaks to the spiritual hollowness of late capitalism – to the loneliness, the nihilism, the disconnection. And liberal technocracy, the ruling ideology of the last 40 years, has failed utterly to address this. The #deathcult of managerial neoliberalism left a void. Now the New Right wants to fill it, with hierarchy, obedience, and repression.

But it should be obvious that this right-wing “solution” is catastrophic. Meaning cannot be mandated by the #nastyfew. Culture cannot be enforced by fiat. Pluralism is not a flaw, it’s the messy reality of modern life. Pretending you can erase difference and enforce unity is delusional. Movements that try always end in repression, exclusion, and worse. What begins as a culture war ends as a culture purge.

A liberal view of this hard right push

So what can we do? This is where the #OMN – the Open Media Network – matters more than ever. Not to magnify the mess, but to mediate it. The #OMN is a native, grassroots alternative to both the hollow liberal centre and the authoritarian push of the right. It doesn’t build through imposition. It builds through federation, dialogue, and trust. Our path is transparent, accountable, and open-source – not sacred, secret, and top-down. Where the hard right sees liberalism’s emptiness and tries to fill it with obedience and dogma, we recognise the same void, and fill it with commons, care, and co-creation.

Please, don’t worship either the old or the new #deathcult. The #MAGA movement preaches high-control authoritarian ideology with high priests in expensive suits. This is why #openweb projects like #OMN matter more than ever. Because if we don’t build our own rooted, federated commons, our own peer-to-peer culture of meaning, then yes, the future will be built by people like JD Vance and the rotting Trump dynasty. And it won’t be a future you can simply opt out of. So stop dithering. Don’t be a prat about it. The time to build the alternative is now.

https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

History has a lot to say on the peasant revolt vs. liberal half-measures

For thousands of years, the demands of the oppressed have remained startlingly consistent: Erase all debts, Burn the records, redistribute the land. These weren’t radical demands. They were and are common sense for those crushed by the weight of extraction, enclosure, and empire.

Compare that to today’s to often #fashionista “leftist” rallying cry of “Tax the rich.” Let’s be honest, this is moderate, half-baked reform in the #KISS sweep of human struggle. “Tax the rich” still assumes the rich deserve to keep most of what they’ve hoarded. It doesn’t touch the foundations of power. It doesn’t challenge the right of a #nastyfew to control the lives and labour of the many, it’s simply a polite request for a fairer share of exploitation.

Let’s talk about #conservatism – not the myth, but the mechanism. It’s not in any way about preserving “traditional values.” That’s branding. It’s about conserving power. Specifically, it’s about conserving the power relationships of the #nastyfew who own and rule, while the rest of us keep our heads down, grateful for scraps. It’s about saying the rich deserve their wealth, and the poor deserve their suffering. It’s about hiding violence behind respectability, and calling it “order.”

This didn’t start yesterday, from the French Revolution to today’s food bank capitalism, conservatism has been #blocking grassroots movements work to compost this mess. And now, it masks itself in liberal #mainstreaming, progressive slogans, while cops will increasingly beat your neighbours in the street.

And yes, if they’re beating your neighbours today, they’ll be beating you tomorrow. But maybe that shouldn’t be the reason to care, maybe it should be enough that they’re beating your neighbours today. This is not about guilt, it’s about clarity, we need to remember what real justice has always meant. Not tweaks, not taxes, not “top” tables with seats for the “marginalised.” But a complete rethinking of power, because if we don’t start #KISS thinking again, we’re not challenging anything – we’re decorating to hide the smell of the #deathcult

Please don’t be a prat about this, thanks.

The story: power, truth, and walking the fun path

Our powerlessness feeds our desire to hate. This is not a personal failing – it’s a social design flaw. A path built on alienation and distraction will always funnel frustration into polarisation. That’s why the controversy-driven algorithms of the #dotcons (corporate social media platforms) are not just annoying, but actively harmful. They feed on our despair, and we, often unknowingly, feed on the drama they serve back to us.

It’s a closed loop of spectacle and spite, profitable to the #nastyfew but corrosive to us, the meany. An extractive business model built on social breakdown. And yet, many of us know this. So why do we stay? Because stepping away from this mess is hard. It takes more than wishful thinking. It takes movement. Not only that, but it takes organising. It takes the kind of networked activism and lived alternatives the Open Media Network (#OMN) has been building and trying to seed for the last ten years

Let us not overlook vital things, because of the bulk of trifles confronting us.

Truth isn’t declared, it’s built. #Postmodernism taught us that truth is slippery. That’s fine, but in the hands of #mainstreaming culture, that slipperiness has become a tool of endless distraction and decay. People say things like they are true because they feel true. They build tech platforms because they believe in them. They sell movements as brands because it looks like change. But let’s be honest: wishing something into truth does not make it true.

What makes things true is collective struggle, shared purpose, and concrete acts of solidarity. A load of social work, grounded activism, and careful trust-building make something true. This is the hard path, but it’s also the only one worth walking, and when we do it together with joy it’s the happy path.

Pettiness separates; breadth unites. Let us be broad and big.

The #geekproblem, again, is too often a part of this mess. Writing code is seen as a kind of truth declaration. “Look, it runs! So it must be real!” But a thing that compiles is not the same as a thing that lives. Tech without community is a corpse. For anything to matter, you need people. And to keep people, you need some rough-and-ready PR. You need actual engagement. You need trust, time, and probably a bit of music and food too. We can’t engineer our way out of this crisis. We have to organise our way out.

The #Lifecult vs. the #Deathcult. What we’re up against isn’t just bad ideas, it’s a worship of stability, spectacle, and control, the illusion of movement through aesthetic alone, no real challenge to the dominant system. It feels warm. It promises safety. But it leaves no room for difference, contradiction, or rebellion, this is inside both “cult”.

It requires less mental effort to condemn than to think

This is why we don’t need worship, we need practical action. Change and challenge are not side effects of our projects – they are the sharp point. We don’t do this work to be liked, we do it because there is no other way to make things true. And if we do this together, it becomes fun and meaningful – we create social “truth”.

Working with the #Eurocrats (and other impossible people). Let’s talk about the institutions. The #EU. Local governments. #NGOs. Big tech “allies.” They are hopelessly incompetent when it comes to grassroots tech and progressive social change. But here’s the thing, they will not go away on their own. If we don’t push, the right-wing will step in and push harder. That’s mess is already happening.

Revolution is but thought carried into action.

So we take the harder path, we show up, try to guide. We keep the door open even when it slams in our face. And yes, it’s exhausting. We’ve tried to work with #mainstreaming people. Many are unbelievably vile, and worst of all, they have no idea they’re behaving badly. They don’t see their role in the decay. They don’t see the crisis, because the spectacle of control makes everything look fine.

But we see it, and we are not powerless, refusing the mess is about rebuilding the commons. Yes, the current #mainstreaming is a mess. A deep, systemic, soul-grinding mess. But we should not put up with it. That’s what #OMN is for. That’s what projects like #indymediaback, #OGB (Open Governance Body), and the broader #openweb movement are trying to hold space for.

We don’t need more hype. We need slow, messy, grounded work:

  • Listen more than we preach.
  • Read each other’s code, politics, and history before rewriting.
  • Talk about our failures honestly.
  • Grow media and networks that are native to community, not layered on top like #dotcons digital colonialism.
  • Build up our own cultures of care and collaboration in the #openweb to replace the dying ones.

This is fun, not a strategy of purity or perfection, it’s a strategy of survival, and even joy.
Ideas? Responses? This is not a closed story, it’s a beginning. If you’re reading this and feeling the weight of it, good. That’s where we start from. But let’s not stop there. Come build, talk, and argue. Come plant seeds, come help make the mess into compost.

All the quotes are from Emma Goldman

Maybe we don’t then get the guillotine out…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe we don’t then get the guillotine out…

Stop chasing tech cults and start growing rooted alternatives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hard right talking points:

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the hard right

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

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

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

The #nastyfew, billionaires funders fear informed, educated public

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#KISS

Post inspired by @Npars