We live inside and meany of us under a system for 200 years, global capitalism, where value is determined not by care, connection, or any collective well-being, but by market logic. If something is not valued in that narrow logic, it is treated as waste. This means that if you don’t actively value the alternatives – you will “accidentally” destroy them. This applies to tech, culture, nature, and community.
In this, tech, has a problem of misplaced value, people still keep using #mainstreaming tools – the platforms and apps of the #dotcons – because they’re easy, because everyone else does, or simply out of habit. But this actively erodes the alternatives we’ve built: It disempowers projects like #visionontv, #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback. It centralizes control, disconnects us from human-scale governance, and reinforces #stupidindividualism.
This highlights the balance of social change vs. technological change. We must be clear: social change without tech will stall, and tech change without social grounding will fail or harm. With the #OMN projects, the #OGB is designed to bridge this divide. It’s not dogmatic, so no rigid ideology fully owns it. But it’s balanced, so many groups can come to accept it, if we can just get it implemented by a committed few.
But this implementation is hard, because we’re all facing BLOCKING, #BLOCKING and the #deathcult. We all BLOCK, we all turn away from truths that feel uncomfortable: Liberals block radical alternatives. Dogmatists block flexible, balanced ones. Most people just block anything that complicates their worldview.
And after 40 years of #neoliberalism, this #deathcult logic is deep inside us all, a vicious cycle of #stupidindividualism. Without community ownership, without collective vision, our tools fail: Projects decay into power politics and people retreat into passivity or purity spirals. And the worship of “personal freedom” just becomes fuel for the fire. We’re trapped in a feedback loop of: Individualism → Disconnection → Destruction → Fear → More individualism.
Change is messy, it’s supposed to be, that’s why we need to give/take ownership of our #openweb infrastructure. We need democratic instincts, not clean #PR. We need value-driven mess, not market-driven clarity. We need to embrace the #KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) path – precisely because it’s the hardest thing for people to do in this world of shiny distractions.
Final point is you are part of this, a lot of people are passive, lazy, even stupid – but not because they’re bad, more because the system makes them this way, because it rewards disinterest. And many of them – many of you – can’t even see the problem, because you’re so deep inside it. That’s the trap, the invisible BLOCK we must face. That’s what the #OMN and #OGB try to push through. So yes – I’m probably pointing the finger at YOU. But also inviting you to build, to grow, to compost the myths and grow something more real, more humanistic.
We need to keep highlighting an old but still urgent tension: the intersection of technology and social change. In this too often unspoken divide, one side leans heavily on practical, technical problem-solving. They want working code, functioning systems, and tangible results, not abstract debates. To them, critiques about capitalism shaping code sound like distractions from the “real work.” The other side insists that technical problems are social problems. They argue that all code is written by people, shaped by culture, power, and history. Ignoring the social dynamics behind technology guarantees we repeat the same failures.
This divide plays out constantly in movements trying to bridge the worlds of #AltTech and social transformation. You see it in tensions between the tech-focused “geek” communities and broader #mainstreaming society. And both sides have blind spots.
The geek camp often falls into the #geekproblem: over-prioritizing tech innovation while ignoring the human and social context. Meanwhile, the #mainstreaming crowd tends to embrace vague social ideals while underestimating the soft power – and necessity – of building real technical infrastructure to support those ideals. Neither side alone can solve anything meaningful, especially not something as vast as rebooting the #openweb or to even start to touch on #climatechaos.
We need bridges, that’s what projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network), #OGB, #IndymediaBack, and #MakingHistory are about: building trust-based, grounded, people-powered platforms that can span the divide between tech and society.
But let’s be honest, there’s a lot of very bad behaviour on all sides of the #openweb reboot. Blocking progress, gatekeeping, aggression, virtue signalling… it’s all too common. Let’s try not to become prats, it’s easy to start, and hard to stop. Mess breeds more mess, prat-ish behaviour comes in waves. It aligns with waves of #mainstreaming and the reactive “alt” backlash, these tides bring a lot of flotsam, it’s up to us to shovel and compost what we can.
Our biggest block right now? The culture war postmodernist fog that has drifted through radical spaces over the past decades. It’s slippery, full of “common sense” that doesn’t hold up, but hard to challenge because it feels right. Composting this will be difficult, but necessary.
The #Fediverse is built on people-to-people relationships. Trust, not just tech, is the foundation. That’s why there’s a healthy pushback against “tech fixes” that try to replace social trust, a path that is much more common in places like #Nostr and #Bluesky, where algorithms and cryptography are too often seen as the solution to everything.
Yes, in reality, we need a balance of both. The debate is fluffy in places, spiky in others. But if we build tech-bridges to span this messy social terrain, we might actually get somewhere. This brings us to the hard green question: how do you scale local, eco-conscious solutions to a disinterested – and sometimes hostile – global population? Green progressives often promote small-scale, ethical living. That’s great for the 1% who can afford to live that way. But what about the other 99%?
Let’s be blunt: some people will die from #climatechaos. Maybe 9%, maybe more. But 90% will still be here, and they will need different kinds of solutions. Right now, the options on the table look like this: A rebooted, green-infused social democracy (the old Corbyn project was an example). A slide into eco-fascism and top-down “solutions” (the Trump path). Or doing nothing, and let #climatechaos run wild (the current #mainstreaming).
One thing is likely, a wartime economy is coming within 20 years, where there’s will be little room for the last 40 years of #neoliberalism, and “soft” liberalism will likely play a secondary role at best, the political landscape is shifting fast. The new #mainstreaming question is which side will you be on?
Because we need more than clean branding and good vibes – we need bold, practical, radical action rooted in both tech and human trust. We don’t just need freedom from the state and the #dotcons – We need freedom from our own dogmas.
The #OMN isn’t just about media, it’s about building the social soil where openness can grow, thrive, and renew. We need compost, and not just as a metaphor.
These people are hopeless, in the literal sense of not having any hope.
The #mainstreaming of the #Fediverse is happening. You can see it in many “progressive” info flows, where the chattering classes of tech – academics, #NGO staffers, consultants, and developers with foundations or startup ties – gather to shape the narrative. On the surface, this looks like success: the native grassroots #openweb is being taken seriously. But look a little deeper, and the cracks start to show.
These are the #friendlyenemy – people who share some values, but whose institutional positions and funding streams push them toward compromise. On a good day, they’re allies. On a bad day, they become gatekeepers, smoothing out the radical edge of the #Fediverse in favour of comfort, control, and incrementalism.
You can smell the vertical path creeping in – softly, but persistently. Some voices are given more weight than others. Those who have access to money, credentials, or “platform” get to define the agenda. Those who don’t are politely sidelined. This inequality, dressed up in professional polish and well-meaning governance processes, is not native to the #openweb – it belongs to the broader culture of common sense #neoliberalism that says, quietly but firmly, “power follows money.”
One of the central issues here is signal-to-noise. These folks will acknowledge it if you ask, that real community voices are harder to hear, that grassroots actors are often overlooked, but in practice, they do little to shift the balance. The very structures they rely on (panels, funding calls, curated spaces) reproduce the same inequalities we’re trying to escape.
The “chattering classes” are not a new problem. In every progressive movement, there is a class of well-spoken, well-educated, well-funded individuals who dominate discourse without doing much of the risky, grounded work needed for real change. They often co-opt language, soften radical ideas, and set up systems that make it harder – not easier – for grassroots actors to lead.
So where do we go from here? We don’t reject these people outright, they are part of the mess we must compost. But we do challenge the structures that elevate them above others. We remember that the #Fediverse was born from messy, volunteer-driven experiments, not corporate playbooks. We prioritize horizontal spaces, open governance, and trust-based collaboration. And we keep building the #OMN and other alternative structures that reflect these principles natively, not as afterthoughts.
If we don’t, the #openweb becomes just another place where a different few speak for the many, and we lose the path in #NGO mess and the chance to build something genuinely “native”. What we don’t need is more non-native paths, please, we have enough #techshit to compost already. We do need ideas on how to communicate this to the people who need to hear?
A bitter taste – the kind you get when you realise you’re seeing a power grab in real time. Our #neoliberal elitist are shifting, the poster figures for market-friendly economic orthodoxy, are starting to shift their tone. There’s something new in the air – old-school #neoliberals are beginning to talk like state socialists. But please don’t be fooled that this isn’t a shift in values, it’s not, rather a repositioning of the same elitist interests to dominate the new economic order that’s growing from the rot of the old one.
The current #neoliberal pivot, from market to managed, is “our” old crew who push competition economics and consistently advocating for market-driven solutions, even when those markets were clearly broken. With this shift, we need to keep focus that their reputation was built within the framework of capitalist orthodoxy. But now, some of these people are stepping into new territory, talking about state intervention, industrial policy, and even strategic autonomy. These used to be the language of the left, of social democracy, of planned economies. So what is pushing this change?
It’s not that this cohort have discovered justice or ecological sanity, rather it’s that the ground has shifted beneath them. #Neoliberalism as a political project has lost legitimacy, the #deathcult is now exposed, and the wannabe ruling class is scrambling to reassert control over the new opening terrain, it’s a power grab.
This is agenda capture in motion, with industrial policy playing as elitist tool, Industrial policy was a dirty phrase in neoliberal circles just a few years ago – but it’s now being repurposed, not to serve the public good, but to maintain statues in a world where market mechanisms are crumbling.
Take the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act or Inflation Reduction Act. They pour billions into infrastructure and green tech, but who benefits? U.S. corporations, defence contractors, and the same fossil-capital interests that got us into this mess. In the EU, we see “strategic autonomy” used to justify subsidies and state intervention – but always within a closed circle of corporate lobbyists, elitist economists, and blind technocrats.
This is an old-failed path of state socialism without democracy. And yes, this is likely to look more like the war economy of the Soviet Union than anything rooted in the emancipatory traditions of the progressive 20th-century. I am not arguing that we don’t need this “war economy” in the era of #climatechaos, but we need to do this better, learning from the failed paths rather than simply repeating them, we need emanatory, rather a period of emergency capitalism and permanent crisis management. The climate emergency will demand massive state action, but without genuine democratic governance and accountability, this action will be captured and centralised in the normal authoritarian structures.
Think: Centralised rationing systems controlled by corporations – Surveillance-enabled “efficiency” models – Green militarisation under the guise of resilience – Digital ID and biometric control for access to services. This change won’t be call “socialism” – but functionally, it mirrors the command economies of 20th century wartime economics.
The difference is that profit remains intact. The commons are still enclosed. The decisions are still made in boardrooms and policy panels, not town halls. From think tanks to tech panels: The same faces with new masks. It’s worth looking for where this shift is happening:
Former neoliberal economists are rebranding as “climate realists” or “strategic planners.”
Think tanks like the Centre for European Reform or Bruegel now host panels on “industrial strategy” filled with the same voices that once evangelised deregulation.
Policy influencers like Larry Summers or Ursula von der Leyen are flipping scripts — talking about “resilience,” “reducing dependencies,” and “national missions.”
The same control, reframed to fit a shifting world of crisis. These people have already failed so we need to be sceptical of them being the solution in this shift, some might have changed, the majority have not.
What we actually need is to clearly step away from this mess, we need, compost, not co-option. We need to be clear-eyed and unapologetic, this elitist pivot is not a win. It is an attempt to capture of the necessary transition. It is not enough to shift the language from free markets to state planning. We need democratic control, radical transparency, and genuine ecological justice. We need the #4opens – not just as a tech principle, but as a social and economic one.
Found this on the subject
Because if we don’t fight for it, we will end up with a high-tech version of Soviet centralism run by BlackRock and Amazon, a closed system dressed in green, where the people remain voiceless, and crisis justifies every control. This is aggressively stealing the agenda. If we’re serious about real change, we have to call this out. Loudly. Early. And with enough compost under our boots to grow something better.
I just was at a talk from the Oxford University. The rise of economic nationalism and the return of state power – While the speakers skirt around key terms like socialism and justice, the implications of what’s discussed are clear, the #neoliberal era is ended, and what comes next is still being shaped.
For the current #mainstreaming the rise of Economic Nationalism is a reaction to the rise of China, the talk explores how China’s rise has catalysed a shift across the rich world – from the free-market dogma of the last 40 years to a new age of “industrial policy”. In essence, the old exploitive game of “global competitiveness” is giving way to nationalist state planning, even if the elitists are reluctant to call it mixed economy, social democracy or even socialism.
In the U.S., this has taken the form of tariffs and export controls, which, let’s be honest, function as subsidies for American corporations. In the #EU, there’s similar movement, more tentative, but real. One key example is the #ReArm Europe military initiative: a push toward industrial resilience, framed through the lens of security but rooted in state-led economic intervention. An example is https://cristinacaffarra.blog/2025/02/03/we-have-to-get-to-work-and-put-europe-first-but-we-are-late-terribly-late/ in tech.
This Western new wave of competitive protectionism benefits the rich nations who already have resources, capital, and infrastructure. Developing countries? They’re simply left behind, again. But, we might actually be on a different path, this time, China’s alternative model is working, the Global South is watching, and in some cases, benefiting.
The result? We’re seeing cracks in the global order that’s been in place since the 1980s – a system that privileged Western elitists while systematically extracting from the rest. A new international economic order may be emerging, and it might – on balance – benefit the South more than the North?
In the USA we see two faces of the same coin, it’s worth noting that both Biden and Trump have walked similar paths. Biden sells this industrial policy as justice-driven, future-focused action. Trump dresses it in nationalist bluster. But the outcome is largely the same: a shift away from free markets and toward controlled, strategic planning – just with different elitist backers benefiting behind the thin curtains.
This opens up the #deathcult for a need for reckoning. Here’s where we need to be blunt: the last 40 years of #neoliberalism – of #mainstreaming market worship – was a mistake. A disaster. A #deathcult. It failed to deliver for most of the people in the west, and was a disaster for the rest of the world. And now, with #climatechaos accelerating, that failure is no longer academic – it’s existential. The current shift to state-led green transitions is a tacit admission that capitalism, cannot handle any future. To shift this, we need strong, progressive states, and we need them fast.
Yet nowhere in the talk does the word socialism come up, despite the obvious trajectory. Nor do we hear the word justice, even though that’s what’s at stake. This silence says a lot about #mainstreaming transitioning. But here’s a constructive provocation: where are the academic voices of responsibility?
On this subject I have a plan – Think Globally, Act Locally – in Oxford and similar elitist institutions, generations of economists, political scientists, and technocrats trained the youth to believe in the religion of markets. Now this mess making is over, can we now ask – kindly but firmly – for these same institutions to stand up and apologize? Not in shame, but in honesty.
Apologize for worshipping failed ideologies. For pushing a worldview that has brought us to the edge. And crucially, explain why they were wrong and what they’ve learned. This act alone could unfreeze some of the apathy among the youth – many of whom intuit the coming crisis but feel trapped in a world still pretending business-as-usual is viable.
We are In transition, yes the language in the talk is still dressed in #neoliberal garments, but the substance is moving toward planned economies, redistributed investment, and long-term thinking. It’s socialism in practice, even if not yet in name. So let’s get on with composting the ideology of the last 40 years. Let it rot, fertilize something new with what’s left. It’s past time to act. Not with nostalgia, but with clarity.
A problem we’ve inherited from the last ten years of corporate social media, the #dotcons, is the toxic confusion of the personal and the public. Platforms like #Facebook and #Twitter blurred the lines between private conversation and public broadcasting, monetizing both as if they were the same. That mess wasn’t accidental; it was profitable.
Unfortunately, we’ve reproduced this mess on the #Fediverse without properly composting it first. What does that mean? We’ve taken this tangled, unhealthy paths and rebuilt them with new tools, many of them open-source, but we haven’t separated the core issues or composted the conceptual issue. As a result, we still see confusion around what content belongs in the public commons and what should stay private. People are still posting as if they’re in a private chat while standing on a soapbox, or trying to gate keep public news through private group dynamics.
The reality is: we already have a clear, simple solution.
The Fediverse is public. It is for public media, public conversation, news, projects, what we want to share with the world.
Encrypted chat apps (like Signal) are for private communication, what we want to keep between individuals or trusted groups.
This needs to be simple #KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid, but instead, we have well-meaning but unthinking devs and users trying to remix the worst of #dotcons culture, mushing together public and private spaces, throwing moderation at everything like it’s a catch-all fix, and muddying the waters of what these networks are actually for.
This is not innovation, it’s common crap behavior inherited from systems built to manipulate, monetize, and pacify us all. If we want more of real, trusted, meaningful media, we have to get back to basics: public news needs to be built on #4opens, and it needs to be created, distributed, and discussed in public spaces.
That’s why projects like #OMN (Open Media Network), #OGB (Open Governance Body), and the #indymediaback reboot matter. They offer paths where grassroots, trust-based publishing thrives again, outside #NGO capture and corporate control and enclosure.
With this change in mind, why the #Deathcult Hashtag?
People often ask why I use the hashtag #deathcult so much. It’s provocative, yes, but it’s not just for shock value. It’s a term that names the dominant ideology of the last 40 years: #neoliberalism. An ideology so pervasive that most people can’t even see it any more, even while it’s actively eroding the very values they claim to be upholding.
You see this when a liberal proudly buys “organic” yogurt at Safeway while supporting systems that are destroying the planet. That’s not just irony, that’s the entire logic of the deathcult. It’s the normalization of destruction wrapped in “ethical” branding. And no, it’s not just the yogurt, that’s just the joke. It’s everything: our phones, our work, our schools, our activism.
If you can’t find a part of your life untouched by the deathcult, it’s because it has touched everything. That’s why the hashtag exists: to make people uncomfortable. Because without that discomfort, we won’t challenge the roots of the system we’re all still living inside.
This movement isn’t about reinventing wheels, it’s about returning to native paths. The public internet worked before. Let’s compost the #techshit by usefully separating the public from the private, and rebuild the “native” path on clear, #4opens foundations.
We can do better, we already know how, let’s stop pretending we don’t.
#Neoliberalism isn’t just an economic system, it’s a cult of self-enclosure. Its superpower? #stupidindividualism, turning people inward, away from shared life, into isolated fragments clicking, swiping, and scrolling through ruins. It disconnects us from collective being, and then sells the pieces back as “individual freedoms.” This isn’t an accident. It’s the plan, a trick of enclosure, take a concept of civic breakdown and turn it into a moral failing of the person, not the system. A classic #deathcult move.
Let’s call it what it is #stupidindividualism = the neoliberal condition of enclosure. A social operating system designed to lock us into self-referential survival while the commons burn.
We’ve all been forced into #stupidindividualism. The #dotcons enclose our attention. The gig economy encloses our labour. Even our friendships are enclosed in “encrypted” DMs, monetized by adtech. Public life? Gone, auctioned off to the highest bidder or locked behind paywalls.
We are encouraged to be good “idiots” in the ancient Greek sense – disengaged from collective power. This #deathcult under capitalism, is a feature, not a bug. They, the #nastyfew want “us” atomized, docile, and scrolling, not stepping away from the path to new norms. And so we rot in a swamp of aestheticized politics – “likes” over lives, vibes over values, empty radical branding over messy collective struggle.
Some symptoms of this sickness can be seen in commons destroyed: Libraries gutted, parks sold off, hospitals privatized. Nothing left to meet in. Social life enclosed: From Facebook groups to “creator economies,” all relations are branded and transactional. Fear replaces solidarity, precarity rewires our brains – everyone a competitor, every community a threat. Politics becomes content, no spaces for deliberation, only comment sections and algorithmic outrage. Under this path, “engagement” is a metric, not a practice. #stupidindividualism is the “normal” common sense path we currently walk down.
The left hasn’t escaped. We’re not immune. We’re infected. Too much of what passes for radicalism is just #stupidindividualism with better fonts. Buzzwords. Identity consumption. Internal drama cycles. Empty memes. Most leftist language itself has been enclosed into performative radicalism, saying the right things in the right tone to the right audience – but nothing changes. It’s a ritual, not resistance. Aesthetic replaces action: Solidarity becomes merch. Mutual aid becomes charity. “Revolution” becomes content marketing.
This is all the “common sense” #mainstreaming by another name. It’s simply #stupidindividualism on the left. And we can’t win if we keep playing by the #deathcult’s dogma. So how do we compost this? We grow living language from real ground. No more floating hashtags. No more semantic bubbles. Here’s the path, embed language in practice, political terms should come from mutual aid kitchens, picket lines, and assemblies – not Slack threads or Twitter feuds.
Don’t just “speak truth to power” – speak truth to each other, if we want to build a better world, we need collective life again. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s survival. We’re in a fight against a system that thrives on isolation. #Neoliberalism has turned us all into (stupid)individuals, and then blamed us for it.
Let’s be clear, the opposite of #stupidindividualism is not intellect, it’s interdependence. So let’s plant words in soil again. Let’s grow meaning from shared struggle. Let’s compost the #deathcult and sprout something real. On this path, just say no to self-enclosure. No to semantic drift. No to aesthetic radicals trapped in content loops. Instead, let’s get our hands dirty.
The opening moment of the workshop on Methodological Strategies for Real-Life Theorising was unintentionally profound. A story of a seagull crieing above the glass façade of the Blavatnik School of Government – a building that stands as a temple to the #deathcult that shaped our lives for the last 40 years of #neoliberal change. In hindsight, that seagull metaphor may have been the wisest participant at the event.
The sessions that followed offered a painful reminder of just how entrenched and constipated academic political theory can be. Many of the speakers, well-meaning, no doubt, spoke in dense, self-referential language, seemingly unaware (or uninterested) in the world burning outside. We are living through accelerating #climatechaos, surging right-wing extremism, and widespread social fragmentation. Yet here, the main concern is career-building through opaque frameworks and method fetishism. One can’t help but wonder how many in the room truly believe they are doing good?
The crisis is deeper than any single workshop. The very career paths that brought these scholars here have been shaped, filtered, and “concreted” by 30 years of neoliberal funding models. The result is a form of political theorising that appears to want to find a way out, but only by squeezing itself through the tightest gaps in the #postmodern mess. And even then, only while clutching tightly to the privileges and assumptions granted by the current paths.
Constipated Language, Abstract Struggles
Throughout the first sessions, there was a recurring sense of people talking to themselves. Even the attempts to make theory “concrete” – to move into empirical territory – felt more like power grabs than inquiry. There was talk of “transient theory,” of “mid-level normative frameworks,” of “ethnographic insights”, but very little clarity on what any of this meant in real practical or political terms.
Instead of confronting the deeply ideological assumptions embedded in liberal academia, the speakers soft-stepped around them. One could sense them trying to smuggle ideology back into a discipline that’s been left hollow. The “heroic era of theory” is dead, and what we’re left with is a ritual performance of relevance. At one point, the liberal impulse to block discomforting inputs in public policy was laid bare. This is ethics as insulation, not action. There was repeated deference to “existing norms and frameworks,” – the very architecture of the #deathcult, now warmed up and served again as policy advice.
The Seagull Still Watches
By the end of the day, some fresh air drifted in. A few scraps of cloth were handed out to the otherwise naked theorists. There was genuine engagement with normative complexity. Questions like “what is mutable?” began to shift the conversation. “Engaged political philosophy” and talk of “normative judgments” began to inch the discussion closer to the ground.
The presentation on restitution, for instance, highlighted real political dilemmas. Who decides what gets returned, and why? Is it justice, diplomacy, or geo-political calculation? One question noted that giving back looted objects is not just about ethics, it’s about giving back the values they represent. But this was quickly hedged with talk of “choice.” Liberal hedging again. No one wanted to say: yes, do it, without compromise.
Even here, markets remained the baseline. The dominant “common sense” is still economic flow. Value is defined by trade, not meaning. Discrimination itself can to easily be reframed as a market distortion, another cost to be corrected, not a systemic condition to be fought. The anti-market perspective, grounded in actual social justice, in living memory, in reparative truth, is invisible to meany people until it becomes a threat. At that point, the strategy shifts to distraction and buying off. That’s the logic of #neoliberal containment.
From Political Theory to Political Theater
What we witnessed was not just a methodological workshop, but a staged performance of institutional survival. Theories were dressed up, displayed, but never walked out into the street. Real political agency remained absent. The political philosopher, once imagined as a public actor, now hides behind peer-reviewed paywalls, while the world asks different questions entirely.
Still, by the end, perhaps there were reasons for the seagull to hold off its stone throwing – for a while. A few voices showed signs of life. A few questions struck true. But it will take more than scraps of normative cloth to cover the nakedness of political philosophy today.
The event: Many political philosophers theorise not only for the sake of pure theory, but also because they want to convince citizens and policymakers to bring about changes in the real world.
Such policy-oriented research often draws on interdisciplinary methods, integrating empirical insights and normative and conceptual arguments. This, however, raises methodological challenges of its own. For example, how to deal with the fact that the social sciences are fragmented and different disciplines work with different paradigms and methodologies? How can philosophers, who bring their own normative assumptions openly to the table, deal with the – sometimes implicit – normativity that is also inherent in many other lines of research? What level of abstraction of normative arguments, eg basic normative theories or mid-level overlapping principles, should philosophers draw on when discussing with policymakers? And how to deal with the fact that in the current political climate in many countries, distrust towards “experts” also extends to philosophers? Workshop agenda
Day 1: Thursday 24 April 2025
Methodological Strategies for real-life theorising
Chair: Jonathan Wolff, Blavatinik School of Government
Liron Lavi, Bar-Ilan University and Nahshon Perez, Bar-Ilan University: Conceptual Concretization in Empirically Informed Political Theory: What Makes a Concept Applicable
Carmen E Pavel, King’s College London: Mid-Level Theories of Justice and Public Policy
Kian Mintz Woo, University College, Cork: Explicit Methodologies for Normative Evaluation in Public Policy
Theorising between values and cases
Chair: Daniel Halliday, University of Melbourne
Rouven Symank, Free University, Berlin: Integrating Ethnography with Political Theory in Policy-Oriented Research: Challenges and Insights from Cultural Restitution Debates
Florence Adams, University of Cambridge: Discrimination as an Object of Social Science
Erika Brandl, University of Bergen: Measuring the justice of architectural development policies:debates on temporal scopes and indicators in the Hillevåg plan
My notes on this event:
The seagull is perhaps a good metaphor for nature fighting back against the last 40 years of human #deathcult culture that this building is temple of.
The language is constipated, a growing feeling that these people are pissing funding and focus against the wall while the world burns from #climatechaos and hard right social breakdown.
I wonder how many people here think they are doing good?
The problem on this career path is that it has been shaped by #neoliberalism for the last 20 years, funding and status have both been ground through this mess, and now reflect it.
After the first session I feel they are trying to squeeze themself out of this post modernist mess. By going back to basics, but it’s so constipated it’s hard to see if there is any value in this.
Looking at them talk and answer questions, you can feel them being lost. It still feels like they are talking to themselves.
A power grab, by making theory concrete, to build empirical research. They dodge this by saying the theory is transient.
If this is a bios? They fix this by making the bios visible. They find this question hard to answer as its a root issue.
They are “soft” sneaking ideology back into the current dead Political Science and theory world they work in.
The heroic era of theory is challenged for making public policy. They argue that we should start from the existing norms and frameworks. This from the #deathcult we get wormed up #deathcult worship as policy. Mess. Of course liberal rights have priority in the end, “we must also include institutional facts”.
The seagulls at the start of this event might be the wisest one here. The rest have no cloths, and the language is so constipated that the smell is likely off putting for any real outreach that they need in the scrabbling for coverings to continue their careers.
The liberals start to talk about #blocking the inputs that make them uncomfortable. In ethical public policy making.
From a working insider view, the people doing this don’t have the skills or knowledge if we focus on philosophy and theory only.
Good question, what is given, what is mutable is very mutable. So the Liberal “common sense” is likely a strong #blocking on the path of the change we need.
“Engaged political philosophy” “normative judgments” as we go on they start to be more relevant. “where there is convergence and divergence”
The event starts naked and smelly but as it goes on the air clears at times and some scraps of cloth are provided.
Relevant information that is easily excessable,
The power in a committee is the appointment of the people sitting on the committee rather than the committee process it self. The answer to this is hesitant and bluff, and distaste to cover this.
A chair or witness roll is different in committees.
Why restitution, why now.
Liberal Justice
Reperatition is politics, not just ethical, geo politics and funding, based on former colonist will, is a tool for “ethical diplomacy”
Can any of these be seen as a reason not to do it. Don’t have an answer. Normative lessons.
When we give back objects that we value from our looting, we are giving back our values. We still chose.
My parents work is displayed in our #mainstreaming institutions, but these institutions are not interested in the objects, as they do not fit into there existing story’s and category. Subject archives will take them. But this is still shaping history.
Markets as the dominant “common sense” everything is economic flows. Value is defined by this.
Discrimination is contested with the hard shift to the right #DUI
Distortion in the market, function efficiently.
Discrimination is about greed, American greed, a moral dilemma. Liberal but not to liberal. Talk about the market path, let the market do its thing.
Markets aligned characteristics, money the logic of the #deathcult
As my work is anti market they can’t see any value, so put no resources and focus on the path in till it becomes a threat then distraction and buying off become the difficult paths.
Trump now is turning this neoliberalism around as discrimination. What is this, discrimination against nation states, rather than economics/market.
At the end the might be reasons for the seagull to hold off the stone throwing for a while.
The best working definition of fascism is simple, economic: “The continuation of capitalism by undemocratic means.” This isn’t abstract theory. Fascism in the 1920s and 30s emerged precisely in response to a very real threat of revolutionary socialism. The Russian Revolution sparked global fear among the capitalist class that their time was up. Fascism – in Italy, Germany, Spain, Austria – arose as a counter-revolution. It wasn’t merely authoritarian nationalism or aesthetic militarism. It was the repressive armour worn by capitalism under existential threat.
Look at the details: In Spain, Franco rose after a democratically elected socialist government began to challenge entrenched economic power. In Germany, the first Nazi concentration camps were built for communists, not Jews. In Chile in the 1970s, the overthrow of Allende’s democratic socialist government was orchestrated by domestic elites and foreign (read: U.S.) interests terrified of socialism spreading in Latin America. Fascism wasn’t a deviation. It was capitalism defending itself with violence. Today, we face the same moment – and too many are looking the other way.
For 40 years, neoliberalism, that mix of deregulation, privatization, and gutting of social safety nets, has shaped our economics and cultures unchallenged. Its effects are easy to see: skyrocketing inequality, mass precarity, and ecological breakdown. But there’s a dangerous myth that neoliberalism is simply unregulated capitalism. In truth, it’s much closer path to economic fascism without the jackboots, until now.
#Neoliberalism didn’t grow in a vacuum. Its roots are in explicit reaction to socialism’s successes. Take Friedrich Hayek, ideological godfather of neoliberal – he was deeply disturbed by Red Vienna, where municipal socialism (like public housing) was working too well. His entire framework arose as an intellectual counterattack to collectivist policies.
And Hayek wasn’t just an ivory tower academic. He directly shaped the policies of Thatcher, Reagan, Pinochet, and the Chicago Boys – bringing theory to life through brutal economic “shock therapy.” Thatcher herself famously declared during a cabinet meeting: “This is what we believe” as she slammed Hayek’s book on the table.
From Mussolini to Musk, capitalism’s new wannabe strongmen. There’s little material difference between Mussolini’s Italy selling off state assets to loyal industrialists and today’s global elites (#nastyfew) hoovering up public infrastructure in the guise of “efficiency.” Mussolini at least expected those capitalists to serve the nation. Neoliberalism assumes, foolishly, that global capital will take care of society without loyalty, borders, or accountability.
In Russia, we see a more classical fascist arrangement: oligarchs allowed to profit, provided they serve the state’s nationalist goals. In the U.S., capital’s alignment with far-right politics is more chaotic but no less real. Corporations rarely oppose Trumpism, despite its chaos. Why? Because, as with 1930s Europe or 1970s Chile, fascism is good for business – so long as the profits roll in and unions, climate activists, and grassroots movements are crushed.
Where we are now is neoliberalism’s endgame, capitalism is in crisis again. But this time the existential threat isn’t just socialism – it’s climate and ecological collapse, a crisis neoliberalism created and cannot solve. And once again, the system’s response is not reform, but repression. Neoliberalism cannot survive democratically. The people don’t want it. So increasingly, undemocratic means are being deployed: voter suppression, propaganda, surveillance, repression, and the rise of far-right movements that promise “order” and scapegoats instead of justice. This is fascism, not a return to it, but its next iteration.
So what now? We don’t just need to resist this – we need to name it. Clearly. Loudly. Repeatedly. The myth that neoliberalism is merely “capitalism with the brakes off” must be composted. It is fascism with #PR. And as in the past, a step, a real alternative comes from the bottom up. From grassroots media, mutual aid networks, radical unions, climate justice movements, and the digital commons. We need to rebuild this solidarity, and we must do it #4opens horizontally, outside the broken institutions that created this mess.
The problem we face is simple and brutal. The right-wing eats everything. Every radical spark, every hopeful idea, every challenge to power, they swallow it, mutate it, and spit it back as bland, digestible social shit.
They take our justified rage and push it back as conspiracy. They take our care and twist it into control. Every revolutionary idea, stripped bare, rebranded, and fed into the #mainstreaming machine as more slop to feed and shape the masses.
This isn’t new. It’s the old game of cultural capture. And they’re very good at it. That’s why we need tools and paths they can’t easily co-opt. Stories they can’t rinse out and rebrand. Protocols that don’t translate into buzzword #blocking. The #4opens, the #OMN, the hashtag as resistance, are frameworks built to rot their greed and appetite.
We compost instead of consume. We grow native paths, not polished products. What we’re building is deliberately messy, deeply rooted, and absolutely unpalatable to the #nastyfew and their simpering acolytes. They want power. We want relational fabric. They want purity spirals and hot takes. We want compost, community, and continuity.
It’s a step. And that matters. As I always say – I like big ideas, but right now, I’m putting my shovel into small steps towards big ideas. That’s how you build something that lasts.
The #blocking of current action, the constant stalls, confusion, and fragmentation, has a lot to do with the mess our use of language makes. And the deeper issue is how this messy language feeds back into our culture, which then loops back to make the language even murkier. It’s a feedback loop that clouds meaning, erodes trust, and paralyses collective action.
The last 40 years of postmodernism and neoliberalism have made this worse. #Postmodernism chipped away at the idea of shared reality, leaving us with endless interpretation and “personal truths.” #Neoliberalism, on the other hand, commodified everything, including language itself, into marketing, spin, and #PR. Together, we have hollowed out words like “community,” “freedom,” and even “change,” to the point that we barely recognize what they mean any more.
Take “mutual aid” for example, a term grounded in deep solidarity and reciprocal responsibility. Now, on both #dotcons and #openweb platforms, it gets reduced to casual crowdfunding and anonymous asks, with little relational context. Not bad, but far from what it could and needs to be.
If we want affinity-based action to work, if we want people to come together and trust and act together, then we have to compost this mess. And the way to do that might be surprisingly simple #KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid, not stupid as in naive, but stupid as in clear.
We need to reclaim simple language that carries shared meaning. This is exactly what we’re trying to seed with the positive side of the #hashtag story. Hashtags act as anchors in this storm of abstraction. They cut through noise, bring us back to the root meaning, and allow collective orientation without needing corporate gatekeepers or institutional filters.
Think:
#4opens — a shorthand for open code, open data, open governance, open standards.
#techshit — composting the mess, not throwing it away.
#nothingnew — slowing tech churn, reclaiming meaningful pace and paths.
Each of these tags points to deeper, shared narratives that are simple, but not simplistic. They invite action, not confusion. Composting the abstraction, regrow clarity, reclaim trust paths in both tech and social spaces. Speak simply, act clearly, hashtag wisely with intention.
On this working path, It is important for the progressives and radicals to come together and focus on the real issues and challenges facing society, rather than fighting among ourselves. Finding this balance between being “nice” and being “nasty” is key to being effective in bringing about any lasting social change.
The #hashtags embody a story and worldview rooted in a progressive and critical perspective on technology and society. They highlight the destructive impact of neoliberalism (#deathcult) and consumer capitalism (#fashernista) on our shared lives, while promoting the original ideals of the World Wide Web and early internet culture (#openweb).
The #closedweb critiques the for-profit internet and its harmful social consequences, while #4opens advocates for transparency, collaboration, and open-source principles in tech development.
The #geekproblem tag draws attention to a cultural tendency in tech: where geeks, absorbed in their tools and logic, overlook the broader social effects of their creations. This feeds into #techshit, where layers of unnecessary complexity pile up, further distancing people from tech’s social roots. Meanwhile, #encryptionists critiques the knee-jerk reaction that “more encryption” is always the answer, reinforcing control and scarcity, rather than liberating people and community.
Together, hashtags tell a coherent and powerful story. They call for a more humane, collaborative, and transparent approach to both technology and society.
#nothingnew asks whether constant innovation is the right path — or if we need to slow down and improve what already works.
#techchurn names the cycle of flashy, redundant tech that fails to solve core issues.
#OMN and #indymediaback point toward an Open Media Network — and a revival of the radical, decentralized media that once rivalled corporate media on the early web.
#OGB stands for Open Governance Body, an invitation to practice grassroots, transparent, community-led decision-making.
It’s an ambitious but needed path and goal, to build and grow social tech that “fails well”, meaning they fail in a way that can be fixed by the people, through trust and collective action, not closed-source patches and corporate updates. The #OMN’s focus is human-first. Tech comes second, as a mediator, a tool, not the destination.
Yes, the #geekproblem is real. Technical expertise becomes a gatekeeping mechanism. But tech can also empower, if we design for simplicity, accessibility, and community-first paths and values. The only working path is simple, trust-based, and human. That’s why we keep coming back to #KISS.
Why haven’t we been doing this for the last 10 Years? Over the past decade, we’ve lived in a state of quiet paralysis. Climate change, ecological collapse, technological overreach, all of it loomed. And instead of digging in, we froze. Well-meaning people chose fear over action. Understandably. But fear is a poor foundation for building anything sustainable.
We’re not on this site to only blame – we’re here to compost. The problem? We stopped critiquing. We stopped examining the tools in our hands. Not only that, but we bought into the illusion that #NGO paths and tech would save us. That shiny apps and startup culture could greenwash a better future. And when the results disappointed, we turned inward, stopped questioning, and left things to rot.
But what if that rot could be composted? By using the #4opens – open data, open code, open standards for open governance, we have a practical framework to call out and compost the layers of #techshit that have built up. Tech that divides us, tech that distracts us, tech that damages the planet and calls it progress. Yes, like gardening, composting takes time. It smells at first. It’s messy. But give it care, and you get soil. Soil to plant better ideas in. Soil for hope.
One of the reasons we haven’t made progress is the #geekproblem, a narrow slice of technically-minded culture made up of (stupid)individuals, which so far have dominated the design and direction of our tools. They, often, mean well. But in their obsession with technical elegance and “solutions,” they’ve sidelined the social and the ecological. What’s left is a brittle, sterile infrastructure, constantly churning out newness without any substance.
Meanwhile, #stupidindividualism has flourished, encouraged by #dotcons social media systems built for engagement, not connection. These silos encourage performance over solidarity, branding over community, and endless scrolling over doing. We’ve all felt it.
And most activist groups, instead of resisting this tide, drank the #NGO poison, chased funding, watering down their goals, professionalizing their resistance until it became another logo in a funding application. We’ve lost a decade to fear, distraction, and capture. But it’s maybe not too late.
We have the tools, in the #ActivityPub based #Fediverse. We have the frameworks, the #4opens can guide us to rebuild with transparency, collaboration, and care. The hashtags like #geekproblem, #techshit, #nothingnew, and #OMN give us a shared vocabulary for critique and regeneration. They point to a web where people, not platforms, hold power, and where technology serves life, not control. Let’s stop being afraid to critique. Let’s stop outsourcing responsibility and get on with composting.
Because that’s where the soil of a better path will come from.
One of the biggest tensions in the fight to build an alternative, sustainable future is the relationship between mainstream resources and grassroots projects. The reality is STARK: grassroots movements need resources to survive and thrive, yet the very act of receiving funding, if they can access it at all, drags them into the suffocating grip of #mainstreaming culture, where the radical edges that make them valuable are dulled and destroyed. So, how can conscious mainstream actors support grassroots movements without killing the radical energy that creates the value in the first place.
The answer lies in sharing resources in non-mainstreaming ways, a difficult leap for many, but an essential one. The only people who can truly be useful in sustaining #openweb paths are those willing to break free from the entrenched habits of top-down control, endless bureaucracy, and the need to polish everything into marketable, bite-sized pieces.
What does non-mainstreaming support look like?
Unconditional Funding: Grassroots projects need funding without strings attached. Too often, funding comes with requirements that reshape the project itself, turning radical experimentation into pointless palatable, measurable outputs. True support means trusting grassroots communities to know what they need and allowing them to allocate resources nimbly. #TRUST#opencollective
Trust-Based Relationships: A “native” healthier approach is to build long-term relationships with grassroots groups, listening to their needs and responding in an organic, flexible way. #TRUST#OMN
Decentralized Decision-Making: Bottom-up governance models. Funding should flow to collectives, not charismatic individuals or figureheads building careers #KISS#OGB
Infrastructure, Not Ownership: A path that might work, rather than buying influence, mainstream actors can provide infrastructure, hosting, bandwidth, servers, physical spaces, without attempting to control the projects using them. Think of it as building bridges, not fences. #Fediverse instances
Amplify, Don’t Absorb: Mainstream platforms and institutions need to amplify grassroots voices without assimilating them. This means using their reach to highlight native radical projects but stepping back to let those projects speak for themselves. No need to repackage the message, people can handle raw, messy reality. #indymediaback
Why this bridge building matters, the current mainstream is crumbling under the weight of its contradictions. As #climatechaos accelerates, as #neoliberalism fails to deliver anything but more suffering, people will look for alternatives. But if those alternatives are already swallowed and sanitized by the current mainstream, hope dims. Grassroots movements are the seedbeds of real change, they hold the living knowledge of how to build differently.
Keeping the bridge in place isn’t an act of charity; it’s a #KISS survival strategy. The future will grow from the compost of the old world, and those willing to step off the conveyor belt of #mainstreaming and into the rich, chaotic soil of grassroots experimentation will be the ones who help plant the seeds.
Let’s look at some history of protest, with the crackdown on #XR’s peaceful, #fluffy protests, it’s no surprise that movements are moving into stronger, more disruptive actions. When one path to change is systematically #blocked, history shows that movements turn too #spiky, and we’re already seeing this shift. Recent events, like the symbolic damage by Oxford University by the Palestine Action group, or climate activists turning to sabotage, signal a new phase in the fight for justice and survival.
This escalation isn’t happening in isolation. It’s the predictable result of a systematic refusal to listen to those calling for change. People lose faith in liberal symbolic demonstrations as the #deathcult of #neoliberalism marches on, indifferent to the destruction in its wake. When doors to dialogue are slammed shut, people look for other ways to be heard.
Universities should be at the forefront of this conversation, providing space for genuine debate on how change happens, not just as an abstract academic exercise, but as a living, breathing discussion that acknowledges the urgency of the current mess. We need to break out of the cycle of blinded performative process and confront the reality that people will not quietly watch the world burn.
The #KISS path reminds us to keep things simple: listen to people, understand the roots of their motivations, and create pathways for meaningful action. Otherwise, as we’re already seeing, the pressure will keep building — and the cracks in the system will only grow wider.
To find my wider view on university’s role in this
