Part of the shitty mess we’re in comes from the failure of #DIY culture and the rise of #stupidindividualism as the common sense path. #stupidindividualism is completely unscalable in social terms. It fragments, isolates, and exhausts. That isn’t accidental, it’s a classic divide-and-control strategy of the #deathcult. And we need to consciously step away, and away, and far away from this.
An example, over the last 20 years, I’ve answered the same questions individually, over and over. But the point of #DIY culture was never one-to-one hand-holding. You don’t need to stress personal connections just to begin. The hashtags are links – they exist to let you start the process yourself.
You can do this by #KISS following the flow, not by demanding individual explanations. Click the #hashtag links. Read the background posts. Trace the project history. Use a search engine. Learn how the process works before pulling people into one-on-one clarification. This is basic #DIY practice, grounded in the #4opens.
You need a second example, looking back, remember how many of our activist friends ran workshops on how to use #dotcons social media as a campaign tool? How to organise activism through corporate platforms? While this was happening, our own independent media was being ripped apart internally, ossified by process, and then abandoned by the same #fashionista activists.
This mess is the devil child of #postmodernism and #neoliberalism, all surface, no grounding, all individual expression, no shared responsibility. We know the names and URLs of many of the people who did this. It’s the legacy we’re dealing with. Our projects like #indymediaback exists because of this history.
If you’re serious about changing society, you have to think your way past this common sense #blocking. That means rebuilding collective pathways, shared knowledge, and common processes, not endlessly repeating the same individual conversations. The tools are here. The links are here. The work starts when we stop pretending this is a personal problem and recognise it as a social one.
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.
Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth: we fucked up the last 20 years of #openweb tech. Not “they” fucked it up. Not only #BigTech, not only venture capital, not only governments and surveillance states. We did, especially those of us who were closest to the tools, the protocols, the decisions – the geeks, developers, architects, and maintainers who shaped how this stuff actually worked in practice.
That matters, because it means we still have direct power over what happens next. Too often, external forces are used as an excuse. “Capital captured everything.” “Users don’t care.” “The network effects are too strong.” These stories become a form of #blocking – a way to avoid the harder work of change and challenge that is still possible inside our own communities.
The #geekproblem role in the #techmess is one of the hardest things to admit, that much of the current #techmess wasn’t imposed on us – it was designed by us. We built systems that privileged scale over care, efficiency over use, protocol purity over social process. We treated governance as a technical problem and social mess as something to be engineered away. We told ourselves that decentralisation alone would save us, while quietly centralising power in code repos, foundation boards, and informal hierarchies.
This is the #geekproblem in action: the blindness to social value, to lived use, to human mediation. The result is vast piles of #techshit – technically impressive, socially hollow systems that decay quickly because nobody actually owns them in a meaningful way.
And when these systems fail, the blame gets pushed outward. “The market did this.” “Users misused it.” “NGOs ruined it.” Sometimes those things are true – but they are never the whole story.
Then we have the # fashionistas default worship of the #deathcult which is the part people really don’t like hearing: most of us default-worship the #deathcult. #Neoliberalism doesn’t need true believers to function. It survives perfectly well on habit, convenience, careerism, and fear. We reproduce it every time we copy the UX patterns of the #dotcons, every time we design for engagement instead of meaning, every time we prioritise respectability over rupture.
At this point, polite critique is not enough. The climate is collapsing. Social trust is eroded. Institutions are hollowed out facades. We do not have the luxury of endless moderation and tone-policing.
Let’s be clear, it is well past time to hold active worshippers of the #deathcult in contempt – not as individuals to be cancelled, but as ideas and practices to be openly rejected. And more importantly, to challenge our own default compliance with those values.
Time is the one thing we don’t have. Yes, this shift will happen. Over the last few years, more people have abandon #dotcons, more will rediscover collective tools, more will rebuild local, horizontal networks.
The #OMN is precisely about that internal power: what we do together, how we organise, how we build, and crucially, what we refuse to reproduce. But here’s the problem #climatechaos does not wait for cultural maturation. Ecological breakdown, authoritarian drift, and economic precarity are accelerating now. If the #openweb is going to matter, it has to matter in this decade – not as a promise, but as lived infrastructure.
That means pushing change and challenge now, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it breaks consensus, even when it costs status. We cannot keep living inside copies of the #dotcons is one of the clearest failures of the last 10 years is this: we kept rebuilding copies of corporate platforms and calling them alternatives. The same feeds. Same metrics. Same influencer dynamics. Same UX assumptions. Just with better politics in the bio. That will never be enough.
For projects like #OMN to become real, we need to invest serious resources and energy into good #UX for #openweb projects – not slickness, not branding, but clarity, legibility, and human-scale control. Interfaces that normal people can understand. Systems that work in mess. Tools that support mediation instead of suppression. This is not about perfection. It’s about use-value over #blocking.
The next step is obvious and unavoidable, it’s not more think pieces, more foundations, more grant cycles. It’s rebuilding social-technical systems that people can actually use together, under pressure, without surrendering control. We already know this. Deep down, everyone reading this does.
The question is whether we act on it – or whether we keep hiding behind inevitability while the world burns. The #OMN is not a guarantee. It’s a refusal: to keep worshipping the #deathcult, to keep copying the #dotcons, to keep pretending we have more time than we do.
The work is here. The tools are here. What’s missing is the will to stop fucking around.
What are you doing today that is not pointless? Not a rhetorical question, a line in the sand. As too much contemporary “activism” is still busywork inside the #dotcons – visible, branded, career-friendly, and structurally harmless. Our old activist circles took the healthy internal tensions that once kept projects like #indymedia honest and fed them upward into a #fashernista vampire class: NGOs, foundations, panels, consultancies. For twenty years, they’ve drained grassroots energy to build CVs and gain access to “power”. That’s not radical, it’s capture.
Now, if we are serious about surviving #climatechaos and confronting the #deathcult, we have to stop doing pointless #techshit and start rebuilding outside the platforms that profit from our failure.
We need projects that doesn’t need permission, we need a #DIY crew. That means gathering like-minded people off the #dotcons, working collectively, not performatively, building small, useful things that actually publish, connect, and persist, following the #4opens: open process, open governance, open code, open data to accept mess, conflict, and compost as signs of life
The Open Media Network (#OMN) is not a brand or career ladder, not a #NGO pitch deck. It’s unfinished work from the original #openweb – work that was paused, captured, and now needs rebooting.
So again, plainly – What are you doing today that is not pointless? If the answer is “posting”, “networking”, or “waiting for funding”, that’s a bad answer. If the answer is building with others, publishing outside capture, sharing control, doing the unglamorous work, welcome back.
Forty years of hard indoctrination doesn’t just fade away. It has to be dug up, held in our hands, recognised for what it is, and composted. If we don’t do this, we have no hope – none – of moving away from the accelerating mess that’s already killing millions and is on track to kill billions. Hobbes’ “nasty, brutish and short” isn’t a warning anymore; it’s a weather report.
Mainstream thinking feels normal because we’ve lived inside it for a generation and a half. But “normal” is a trick. Normal is the smell of rot covered with flowers. Normal is the daily worship of the #deathcult: competition as virtue, greed as destiny, extraction as progress, (stupid)individualism as freedom. Normal is the mess of walking around in a toxic story and calling it common sense.
A useful social activism path is to make this “common sense” story feel dirty, polluted, contaminated. Because it is, everything we touch – our institutions, our media, our language – is soaked in the residue of #neoliberalism. The indoctrination runs deep enough that we police ourselves long before any authority needs to step in. We repeat the slogans: There is no alternative. Don’t be unrealistic. Be responsible. Trust the experts. Let the market decide.
And that’s why we need to dig, turn over the dead soil so something else can grow. We need to break the spell and remind people that doubt, imagination, and collective action used to be normal too, before they were systematically stripped away.
Composting isn’t about purity or escape, it’s about transformation. Taking the poisoned narratives, breaking them down, mixing them with lived experience, adding the oxygen of open discourse, and letting something organic and grounded emerge. Something native, that belongs to us.
The #OMN, the #openweb, the #fediverse, grassroots media – these aren’t personal hobbies. They’re the tools we use to use, and can use agen to compost forty years of damage, to open spaces where new stories can sprout. To let people speak without being filtered through corporate interests and #NGO gatekeeping, rebuilding trust, messiness, solidarity, and actual democracy.
Because the mainstream isn’t just wrong – it’s killing us. And the longer we pretend it’s clean, the faster the rot spreads. Its past time to get our hands dirty, time to compost the #deathcult to grow something worth living in.
If you’re looking to do affective activism – activism that moves people, shifts culture, and builds real change – then you need to start from lived reality, not from academic distance.
The academic histories of our movements aren’t useless, but they are strongly second-hand and often shaped by #fashernista thinking: polished narratives, fashionable theory, safely detached accounts. They smooth over the mess, the conflict, the creativity, the failures, everything that actually matters when you’re trying to build power from below.
What we do need are more minority views from the people who were there. Not just the dominant stories, not just the tidy retellings, but the perspectives that expose the actual tensions inside our organising:
open vs closed
process vs control
serendipity vs bureaucracy
These are the real power that shaped our victories and our collapses. Take #indymedia. From my experience, it began open, horizontal, serendipitous – messy in all the productive ways. And it died closed, formal, bureaucratic – captured by the very forms it was created to resist. This is not a critique of individuals; it’s a plain, structural story. And it’s the kind of story we must use if we want to reboot anything today.
This is exactly why we have the #4opens: openness of code, data, process, and community. It’s a simple but powerful way to mediate these recurring problems. It keeps us grounded in transparency rather than personality, in shared pathways rather than gatekeeping, in public good rather than private control.
If any of this reads like a personal criticism, it isn’t. It’s a reminder that the future depends on honest memory, not sanitised mythology. To build the next wave – #OMN, #openweb, new grassroots media – we need our own histories, told by us, in our own messy, contradictory, living voices. That’s the compost the next movement grows from.
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.
The illusion of modern society is that freedom is only individualistic, when our freedom is in truth interconnected with the well-being of everyone. This is one of the central pushes of the #deathcult – the mess of #neoliberalism we still live and work inside. It tells us that we are free as consumers, that choice equals’ liberation, and that personal success is the highest form of virtue.
But this is a hollow freedom. What kind of liberty exists when every interaction is transactional, every space is owned, and every so-called “community” is just a market segment waiting to be monetized? We experience this every day. The #dotcons sell us “empowerment” through sharing, but it’s sharing inside a cage. Their platforms reduce human connection to engagement metrics and ad revenue. Every “like” is data for their shareholders, not any gesture of solidarity.
The #NGO world isn’t much better. It preaches collective change and “amplifying voices,” yet operates like any other corporation, brand-driven, risk-averse, allergic to the messy, unpredictable reality of grassroots organising. Instead of networks of solidarity, they build vertical hierarchies of control. The people they claim to represent become “beneficiaries,” not participants.
Even in the alt-tech and “decentralised” spaces, this same illusion creeps in. Too often, we see projects confusing personal control with collective freedom, endless talk about privacy and autonomy without any grounding in social trust. A federation of silos is still a field of fences if the people behind them don’t share any values, practices, and care.
Real freedom isn’t about escaping others; it’s about building with them. The #openweb once embodied this, a commons of creativity, trust, and shared #FOSS tools. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked because people shared more than data; they shared intentions. The current #4opens are social principles first, technical structures second, path back to this.
25 years ago, seeded from the undercurrents video collective, we built #indymedia from this soil. Affinity groups came together to tell stories from the streets – direct, unfiltered, alive. You could see and touch it: the cables, the battered servers, the faces in the room lit by CRT monitors and endless tea. It wasn’t about perfection or control; it was about social connection.
Now we are knee-deep in mess, and need shovels to composting the Illusion, the challenge is to compost this #mainstreaming, to turn the rotting soil of #stupidindividualism into fertile ground. This is the work of the #OMN (Open Media Network): to regrow grassroots media not as a brand, not as a product, but as a living ecosystem of stories, links, and local action. Each part feeding the other. Each voice linked, not owned.
Where #dotcons feed on data extraction, we feed on compost, the messy remains of failed systems and burnt-out movements, broken down, rotted, turned into nourishment for the next cycle. Because our freedom doesn’t live in the self, it lives in the network, in the commons, in the trust between people, in the code and culture we share.
The individual without community is not free, only adrift. The collective without openness is not strong, only captured. Freedom is not mine or yours. It’s ours, or it isn’t freedom at all.
In the #mainstreamin tech path, this is a useful step:
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?
Full film Fail Safe (1964) is a cultural mirror, from another age, that helps us think about the next ten years of mess. With technical systems out of human control. The film’s malfunctioning machines map directly onto today’s algorithmic governance (#dotcons, #AI, automated warfare). Once the chain starts, humans can’t pull back.
Leadership under impossible pressure. Henry Fonda’s president embodies the loneliness of decision-making when systems collapse. Compare that to our current leaders, who are weaker, more performative, and less willing to carry the weight of consequence.
The Professor’s logic vs. human life: Matthau’s cold “game theory” feels like the #neoliberal technocrat mindset – numbers over people, outcomes over ethics.
The unthinkable concessions of the ending forces us to imagine the price of avoiding total annihilation – not a win/lose game, but a choice between different forms of catastrophe. That’s climate politics, resource wars, pandemics, and #dotcons algorithm risk we face.
What lessons can we learn for the next decade? System fragility is the real enemy – climate systems, financial systems, digital platforms: one glitch, and collapse ripples out. We don’t have the principle modernism, Fonda’s gravitas – our current elitists class are hollowed out by #PR driven populism; when the crisis comes, trust won’t be there. The “Professor” mindset dominates – policy is still guided by “hard” data, models, metrics, and “rational actors,” even though reality has long escaped those dogmatic frames. Watching Fail Safe today is like watching the #deathcult’s worldview in black and white: centralized control, elitist decision-making, people as statistics.
What we need is open, collective mediation – instead of waiting for one lonely leader in a bunker, we need horizontal systems (#OMN, #openweb) that can act before catastrophe hardens. The #OMN and the #openweb reboot are the anti–Fail Safe projects: decentralize agency, mediate conflict before escalation, building trust outside fragile centralized systems. It’s a powerful film, because it frames the stakes not just as “politics” but as civilizational survival.
It’s a film of our times, what can we learn for the #openweb? In 1964, Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe held its audience in terrified silence. A simple technical malfunction – a misread code – sent American bombers hurtling toward Moscow. No one could call them back. The world’s survival depended on one president’s unthinkable decision. It was fiction, but it spoke to a truth of the nuclear age: centralized systems, once in motion, cannot be controlled.
Sixty years later, we are in our own Fail Safe moment – but this time the system is digital. The malfunction, is #neoliberalism embedded in our algorithmic #dotcons pipelines. As we push more #AI moderation system, hallucinates flags, the error replicates at machine speed across platforms. What began as a technical hiccup hardens into policy. Governments, seeing chaos, step in “to restore order.” dictators empower security agencies to control networks, to stabilise their hold on power. Like the bomber wings in Fail Safe, the system escalates itself. Once the order is given, there is no recall code.
The #OMN alternative to this is #KISS we need to build is affinity groups on the #openweb – messy, small, federated – to keep our communities talking. Instead of one brittle command chain, thousands of small nodes exchange trust. Instead of a sinal voice, a new signal-to-noise ratio emerges. This slows the shift right. People can begin to rebuild, bottom-up.
Fail Safe ended in tragedy, with a president sacrificing New York to prevent global annihilation. It was a portrait of lonely leadership in a centralised system gone haywire.
Our age offers another path. The lesson is stark that In centralised systems, malfunction = collapse. In federated, mediated systems, failure = resilience. The #openweb reboot is not about nostalgia for old tech. It’s about building structures that can survive the malfunctions ahead. When the next ten years are defined by glitches, spirals, and breakdowns – and they will be – then the survival of our social fabric depends on embracing the horizontal path.
The nuclear age taught us that a single misread code could end the world. The algorithmic age is teaching us that the current glitch could end society.
The #openweb native path gives us more of a chance to be Fail Safe.
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.
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.
We have been stripped morally naked by the last 40 years of the #deathcult. Every assumption that we lived in a tolerant, “good” world is slipping away. The growing #classwar was historically balanced to stop the possibility of a socialist takeover, as blinded liberals see this, two accidents: a temporary ecosystemic surplus and a temporary post-WWII settlement. Both have been rapidly dismantled. And when this safety net, foundations are gone, the liberal illusions fall with them.
What this looks like in the USA, Trump, neoliberalism’s golem, is dismantling his creators’ project. The Democrats wander listlessly like puppets with their strings cut. Client states are facing rebellion without the normal imperial backing. This growing stagnation wasn’t an accident, it was the plan. Just enough suffering to keep people scared, not enough to spark revolt. Just enough democracy to keep people hopeful, not enough to allow change.
If things keep going without major changes, we end up with fascism or authoritarianism in every major country. The next possibility of change is whether China’s technological developments manage to hold global warming under 2 degrees. If not, every border becomes a vicious killing zone, not the “minor” ones we already live with, but a planetary system of militarised exclusion and death.
What would stop this? It’s unpredictable, maybe the reboot of an old ideology, or the dramatic growth of one that barely exists today. A return to #neoliberalism won’t help, and a return to pre-neoliberal #liberalism is impossible. Between 1850 and 1950, ideologies bloomed, clashed, and died. In the last 80 years? Nothing but consolidation and suppression pushed the current blindness. In digital media the #dotcons algorithmic machine is accelerating the mess, the traditional media world is closing.
The suffering is rapidly accelerating beyond tolerance, beyond what can be hidden. Some say immiseration brings revolution, but, revolutions comes when expectations of something better are dashed, not when misery drags on. In the 20th century Marxism, authoritarian socialism crowded out other left paths, and when it faded, little remained. For the mess to endure, #Neoliberals didn’t have to control everything; they just had to preside over a void.
And into this void for the last 20 years the blinded #fashionistas pushed the #dotcons. YouTube, Facebook, TikTok – as algorithmic machines feeding fear and control, that then went on to feed the hard right, who picked up the agendas and traditions of the left with the fall of the past left projects and paths. The right twisted solidarity into nationalism, collective action into mob violence, critique into conspiracism. We fucked this up, and now we have to fix it. The fix for this mess isn’t going to come from #mainstreaming policy papers or NGOs. The real fix has to come from the messy, grounded rebuilding of #classwar based open networks to grow and spread grassroots trust.
To make this change we need an affinity group to short circuit the hopelessness they sell us, yes, it’s easy for the few to see that this hopelessness is a lie. But shifting to the majority to rebuild #mainstreaming is a much bigger project. So a small step is projects like the #OMN. If we don’t plant something better like this, we will be force-fed the future YouTube and Meta have already chosen for us. And that future looks a lot like fascism dressed up as entertainment.
In our political paths we face a mess, the hard right has been taking the agendas, traditions, and paths that the left abandoned, and twisting them to push its authoritarian politics harder. It’s a mess of our own making. When we walked away from the sense-based left paths – trust, solidarity, open debate, collective action – we left a vacuum. The right filled it with fear and control. Yes, we fucked this up, now we have to fix it #KISS
With the spreading of right-wing propaganda on the #dotcons we’re experiencing late-stage algorithm control. Once it starts feeding this current level of right-wing “recommended” propaganda, you can be certain that the average person has been saturated with it for years. That’s in large part how we end up with the cultural rot and polarisation we see now.
The dynamic is simple:
Engagement is the only metric → anger and fear drive more engagement than trust or hope → the algorithms amplify right-wing and conspiratorial content as a feedback loop.
Normalisation follows → people stop noticing the manipulation, because it comes wrapped in every day “banter,” “debate,” as “news.”
Politics bends to the feed → #mainstreaming media, #NGOs, and politicians chase the same attention flows, further dragging “common sense” into the gutter.
So yes, getting people to step away from #dotcons and back into the #openweb is crucial. The compost metaphor fits:
#techshit to compost → all the broken, manipulative, ad-driven “social” platforms.
The #Fediverse is a step, then the #OMN → a messy, trust-based garden where communities can grow their own media again, rather than being force-fed monoculture by algorithm.
Path forward → build simple, transparent tools (#KISS) and link them to social practices (trust, affinity, #4opens) so people see the difference in their own lives
This move is necessary because the alternative is to let the rotting #deathcult (#neoliberalism + #dotcons) keep pushing smoke and mirrors, feeding on our attention, poisoning our discourse, and steering our politics to the hard right.
Useful composting work is getting people to step away from the right propaganda paths, who play us, to distract us from the extremes of the right for example by claiming there’s an “extreme left.”
Let’s lift the lid on this. The right is driven by individualism and the obsession with “winning” as if it’s a contest. This path breeds selfishness and calculated cruelty with zero empathy – more selfishness, more cruelty. The left, is a strong contrast, it starts from kindness and mutual support. It believes in sharing, in building together. The extreme of that isn’t violent chaos but extreme kindness, extreme empathy. Which side would you rather see amplified by algorithms?
And yes, our thinking on this is a mess. We need to get to work with shovels to compost this – so get shoaling.
In this accelerating collapse – where #climatechaos spirals and #neoliberalism guts the very idea of society – we urgently need to confront a painful truth: it’s simple, the #nastyfew are a parasite class. And that this class feeds on the very foundations of well-being, survival, and joy that the majority of the global population desperately needs. They are the ones who keep the engines of destruction humming, not out of necessity, but out of greed and fear of irrelevance. These people and their institutions flourish precisely because most of us are lost in the distractions of #mainstreaming and false hopes of reform.
The big picture is Capitalism’s global predation – Zooming out, this is the capitalist class – those who own, hoard, and manipulate the resources, labour, and attention of billions. They weaponise economics, push debt, drive resource wars, and now greenwash their way through #climatecollapse while investing in bunkers and surveillance. They bankroll right-wing populism and push for austerity, while lobby for tax cuts as profits soar.
The close-up: People you might know, zoom in, and things get messier. This parasitic drive isn’t only held by billionaire industrialists. In many cases, it’s people close to us, sometimes unknowingly, sometimes not. These are the minor functionaries of capital, the wannabe gatekeepers, and the careerists who believe that “playing the game” will protect them from collapse.
In tech, it is clearer, parasites wearing hoodies. The Bitcoin Bros: Obsessively libertarian, they fetishise decentralisation while promoting hyper-individualist economics that mirrors the worst of Wall Street. They talk about freedom but build systems of exclusion, greed, and extraction. If you spend your energy pushing #crypto as liberation while ignoring ecological and social costs, you are enabling the parasite class – and likely dreaming of becoming one.
#Dotcons Executives: The Zuckerbergs, Bezoses, and Musks of the world are obvious examples. But look further down the food chain: the startup bros who pivot endlessly looking for #VC buyouts, the marketing execs who gut communities for ad metrics, the devs who code endless optimisations to squeeze more value out of users. If your business model depends on surveillance, addiction and enclosure, you’re the problem.
The careerist #NGO tech elitists: Yes, even the “good” sector can be captured. NGO professionals who endlessly hold conferences and produce whitepapers while blocking actual grassroots projects. They take seats at tables designed to exclude the people doing real, messy, transformative work. They don’t oppose the #nastyfew; they stabilise their control.
So what do we do? First, see clearly, name the parasitism. Understand that systems don’t just fail; they are designed to benefit the few and contain the many. Second, build bridges away from this mess – rooted in the #4opens: open data, open source, open process, and open standards. This is the beginning of composting the parasite class. Third, support native projects: not the VC-funded copies or the corporate-friendly NGOs, but the messy, local, collaborative tools and networks that build resilience and joy from the ground up. Projects like #IndymediaBack, #OMN, and others pushing against the tide are places to start.
Because in the end, the parasite class only exists as long as we feed it.
