Hamish Campbell an #openweb organic intellectual and technologist
Tag: neoliberalism
The illusion of modern society is that freedom is only individualistic, when our freedom is interconnected with the well-being of everyone. This one of the central pushes of the #deathcult – #neoliberalism’s mess we still live with. It tells us that we are free as consumers, that choice equals’ liberation, and that personal “success” is the highest form of virtue. But freedom is not only transactional, every space owned, and every “community” a market segment?
We experience this when #dotcons sell empowerment through “sharing” and the #NGO sector preaches collective change, yet operates like corporations, brand-driven, risk-averse, and allergic to the messy reality of grassroots organising. Even in alt-tech and “decentralized” spaces, we see the same issue, people mistaking personal control for collective freedom.
Real life freedom isn’t about escaping others, it’s about building with others. The #openweb once embodied this: commons of creativity, trust, and shared tools. The #4opens are social ways of describing this technical path, describing collective freedom rooted in transparency and trust.
Seeded from the undercurrents video collective we built #indymedia, with affinity groups gathered to tell stories from the streets, that was freedom, messy, contradictory, alive. You could see and touch it, the cables, the servers, the faces in the room. It wasn’t about perfection or control; it was about social connection.
Today, the challenge is to compost this #mainstreaming illusion, to turn the rotting soil of #stupidindividualism into fertile ground. That’s the work of the #OMN (Open Media Network): to regrow grassroots media not as a brand, but as a living ecosystem of stories, links, and local action.
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.
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 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 soviet 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 the 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 ecosyteams the #dotcons algorithmic machine is accelerating the mess, the traditional media world is closing.
The suffering is 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. The 20th century Marxism of the authoritarian socialism crowded out other left paths, and when it faded, little remained. #Neoliberals didn’t have to control everything; they just had to preside over a void.
And into this void the blinded #fashionistas pushed the #dotcons. YouTube, Facebook, TikTok – as algorithmic machines of 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. The right twisted solidarity into nationalism, collective action into mob violence, critique into conspiracism. We fucked this up, and 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 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.
The hard right is taking all 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. We fucked this up. Now we have to fix it. #KISS
With the spreading of right-wing propaganda on the #dotcons what we’re experiencing is a late-stage symptom of the #dotcons algorithm machine. Once it starts feeding this level of right-wing “recommended” propaganda, you can be certain that the average person has been saturated with it for years. That’s 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.
Normalisation follows → people stop noticing the manipulation, because it comes wrapped in everyday “banter,” “debate,” or “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.
#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.
The move is urgently necessary because the alternative is to let the rotting #deathcult (#neoliberalism + #dotcons) push smoke and mirrors, feeding on our attention, poisoning our discourse, and steering our politics to the hard right.
The right propaganda, commentators, try to distract us from the extremes of the right 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?
We need to get to work with shovels to compost this mess.
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.
If we want to build meaningful alternatives, we must deal with difficult issues head-on. Sweeping things under the carpet – especially in radical spaces – always comes at a cost.
One of the more complex, and often misused, areas is around identity politics, particularly the playing of the race/gender card in ways that obscure rather than clarify the real issues at stake.
Let’s be clear: systemic racism and sexism are real. We all live with the deep, painful legacies of colonialism, patriarchy, and class oppression. These power structures are embedded in our cultures, our institutions, and, yes, in our own organizing spaces. Naming and addressing them is vital.
But sometimes, identity markers are used as shields, not in the pursuit of justice, but to avoid accountability. When this happens, especially in grassroots or activist collectives, it creates paralysis and prevents us from dealing with actual abuse of power.
A real-world example. This happened to me some years ago at a community-run space in Dalston. One person dominated meetings, spoke over others, and made every decision-making process a battleground. It was classic power politics, silencing others through constant assertion and manipulation.
When I finally took responsibility to challenge this, the room froze. Instead of engaging with the issue, some defaulted to “both sides are equally problematic.” Then, when pressure built, he played the race card, asserting that my criticism was racially motivated. No one knew how to respond. The conversation shut down. I became “the problem.” He continued unchecked.
It took 6 months of dysfunction and damage to the project before he was finally removed from collective meetings. In the end, people realised: yes, he was mentally unwell, addicted, controlling, and yes, he had useful skills. But we had all failed to support him and the group because we didn’t deal with the real power dynamics early and honestly.
Hard truths, sometimes someone uses identity-based arguments not as a reflection of structural injustice, but as a way to deflect accountability. When that happens, we can end up with unchallengeable behaviour patterns that destroy collectives from within. This doesn’t mean ignoring or downplaying racism, sexism, or mental health, far from it. It means being brave enough to hold multiple truths at once:
Someone can be from a marginalised background and be acting out of line.
Someone can be struggling with mental health and still be causing harm.
Power politics doesn’t disappear just because it’s wrapped in the language of social justice.
What Can We Learn?
Deal with issues when they come up. Don’t defer hard conversations. Don’t wait for people to burn out.
Support everyone – including people acting out – with clear boundaries, not blanket exclusion or indifference.
Distinguish real oppression from manipulative tactics. It’s not easy, but it’s essential to long-term health of communities.
Don’t collapse into false equivalences – not every confrontation is “two monsters fighting.” Trust your political instincts.
Ultimately, we need to reclaim the messy, complicated work of building trust, of calling in rather than calling out, and of recognising power wherever it appears, even when it wears familiar or “progressive” clothing. We won’t fix any of this with purism or purity politics. We’ll do it by grounding ourselves in collective care, lived experience, and honest struggle.
To use technology as a part of this social change, we need better working with the #dotcons generation. This generation is a mess. No surprise after 20+ years of submission to the #deathcult:
#Neoliberalism hollowed out our economies and replaced solidarity with consumerism. #Postmodernism fragmented identity into a battlefield of individualism over collective action. #Dotcons centralized control, turning the internet into a corporate surveillance machine.
The real question is: how do we break free? When our #fashernistas still dodge this, trapped in cycles of performative activism, #NGO co-option, and endless distraction.
The activist path out of this mess is not more chasing trendy tech stacks or branded illusions of progress. What we need is a grounded, #KISS path forward, #OMN (Open Media Network) to building grassroots, independent media beyond corporate platforms. #4opens for transparency, collaboration, and trust baked into our tech + social governance. And, reclaiming #DIY activism real-world organizing, not just digital spectacle.
We don’t need more #geekproblem “fixes” or slick branding #PR exercises. We need radical, collective agency. The tools are here, let’s build.
At its core, #mainstreaming is how we, often unconsciously, uphold and reproduce the values of the dominant system. In our time, that system is #neoliberalism, or what I metaphorically call the #deathcult. It’s the air we breathe: shaping our politics, our economics, even the food we eat and how we relate to each other.
In activist terms, #mainstreaming too often means pushing this dominant worldview into alternative spaces, building careers and institutions that play progressive on the surface, but reproduce the system that’s driving the crisis. It’s what happens when people take grassroots energy and repackage it in #NGO boxes or #dotcon business plans. The result? We end up feeding the monster we’re supposed to be fighting.
This is the path to #stupidindividualism, where neoliberalism “common sense” didn’t just attack unions, welfare and public goods – it atomized our identities. Over the past 40 years, we’ve been trained to act as isolated economic units, individualism replaced solidarity, competition replaced care. This is what we metaphorically call #stupidindividualism – the corrosive belief that the only way forward is by looking after yourself, even when your actions are part of a system that destroys community and climate we realy on. And as history has shown us, when communities collapse, what rushes in to fill the vacuum is fear, resentment, and authoritarianism, in a word: #fascism.
In real-world examples, let’s take @NovaraMedia. They produce great content. But their distribution strategy is rooted in #dotcons (YouTube, Twitter, Instagram), and their cultural aspirations are aimed at becoming the next @Guardian – a new fresh node in the old crumbling system. They’re playing inside the media ecosystem of the #deathcult. Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to grow an audience. But if we don’t also invest in building and sustaining #grassroots alternatives, we’re just treading water in the mainstream’s tide.
Most NGO agendas follow this same logic: speak in respectable tones, aim for policy tweaks, never rock the boat too hard, and above all, protect your funding. This echos my experience of doing media training and its limits, I’ve spent 25+ years training thousands of people to create radical, grassroots media, through projects like #Undercurrents, #Indymedia, #visionontv, and now the #OMN. Here’s what happened: Most of those trained went on to have careers in mainstream journalism or #NGO communications. Almost none stayed with grassroots projects. And honestly, I kinda don’t blame them, it’s hard to survive outside the system. But that’s the problem: without long-term support for non-mainstreaming work, there’s no soil for alternatives to grow.
We trained them to change the world, but the world then trained them to change careers. So what do we do? If we don’t build real, working, alternatives, then the only future left is one where billions of people die or are displaced over the next 100 years, from accelerating #climatechaos, and the rise of digital authoritarianism and political fascism. That’s why we need to push back against mainstreaming, not with purity politics or infighting, but with tools and structures that offer real alternatives.
Technically solid
Politically grounded in the #4opens and #PGA hallmarks
Designed to resist co-option by the #NGO sector or #dotcon logic
Rooted in peer-to-peer cooperation instead of hierarchical control
This path is a seed of something better, not perfect, not finished, but growing from decades of experience. We can’t blame people for trying to survive, but still we can and must build and defend spaces that nurture something, different, better.
It took four decades of sleepwalking through #neoliberalism, cultural decay, ecological collapse, and social atomisation, but at last, the #mainstreaming is starting to talk about the #deathcult we’ve been worshipping.
Case in point: Steve Coogan – yes, Alan Partridge – is now publicly accusing Keir Starmer and Labour of “paving the way for Reform UK,” the rising hard-right threat. Here’s the article. It’s not satire, it’s despair. Coogan’s right, and a few years ago, such a comment from a mainstream celebrity would’ve seemed extreme. Today? It’s just stating the obvious.
The “centre” has collapsed. The “left” has hollowed itself out in fear. And the space where #lifecult politics might live is now overrun with fear, cynicism, and opportunism. This is the #deathcult in action, the system that tells you there is no alternative while everything burns down around you. For 40 years we’ve been taught to accept decay as progress, control as freedom, and despair as maturity.
But here’s the thing, we told you so, for people like me, and many others working on open networks, digital commons, grassroots media, and post-capitalist systems, this isn’t news. We’ve been working and talking about this for decades.
In the world I am in, we’ve already working on alternatives: Decentralised governance via the #OGB. Federated publishing through the #OMN. Ethical tech rooted in the #4opens. And a cultural path that doesn’t rely on selling your soul to #dotcons or begging #NGOs for scraps.
We weren’t trying to be ahead of the curve. We were trying to get people to notice the damn cliff. Now that we’re tumbling over it, suddenly everyone’s surprised. Now the #mainstreaming, which ridiculed or ignored these grassroots, native paths, is whispering our language, but still to often refuses to take the paths we are on.
On this continuing common sense #blocking, let’s be blunt – now is the time to stop being prats about this necessary change. No more waiting for the next electoral saviour. No more hiding behind polite inaction. No more pretending that rebranded centrism is going to save us from fascism, it won’t.
If you're reading this, you probably already know the centre won't hold. So what's stopping you?
We don’t need more think pieces, what we need is more people to get their hands dirty, pick up the tools we’ve been building, and start doing the real work. This means, in my area of tech activism:
Federating your networks.
Hosting your own content.
Engaging in horizontal governance.
Publishing with principles.
Building trust and commons, not brands and silos.
The good news? The framework paths exist, the seed communities exist, the infrastructure, with the #Fediverse is small but growing solid. What’s been lacking is you, your time, your courage, your refusal to keep being a prat, to become brave enough to take this different path.
This Isn’t about nostalgia – It’s about now. We’re not dreaming of the past, we’re recovering futures that were lost when the #dotcons, the NGOs, and the #neoliberals buried the #opwnweb’s radical possibilities under a mountain of grift and branding. This isn’t utopianism. it’s simple pragmatism, resilience. It’s how we survive the rise of the new right without defaulting into the arms of the old centre – the ones who made this mess in the first place.
And for the record, if you need reminding: In this tech path, we don’t need another “platform.” We don’t need another fake “community” run by venture capital. We don’t need more loud voices doing nothing. What we need is to take paths back to rooted, open, and federated ways of working.
This is what the #OMN and #4opens have always been about. You can ignore it for another year or two, but you won’t outrun what’s coming, better to start planting now – it’s not too late to grow something real.
The time is now, if you’re waiting for permission, this is it. The people who once called us cranks are now writing op-eds about the collapse we have seen coming for years. The centre is falling, the right is mobilising, the old paths are dead ends.
The future will be built by those who show up now.
We need you, not in six months, not after the next election, now. Stop being a prat, pick up the tools to help build the next world – before the current one burns it all down.
Reflections from the Rothermere Institute Symposium#Oxford
This recent panel brought together a group of notable scholars – Melinda Cooper (Australian National University), author of Counter-Revolution and Family Values; Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Calvin University), author of Jesus and John Wayne; Joel Suarez (Harvard University), author of Labor of Liberty, forthcoming; and Noam Maggor (Queen Mary University of London), author of Brahmin Capitalism. – to explore the political and moral economy of the Trump Era United States. Their combined analysis is a vivid picture of how we arrived at our current political moment and the limited pathways out of it.
It was a really positive event, what’s striking is how much this conversation resonates not only in the U.S, but globally – particularly in the U.K., where the disintegration of the liberal centre is now fully visible. Over the last decade, we’ve seen the collapse of centrist consensus, leaving voters with a stark binary: hard right or hard left.
The collapse of the centre is leading us to the only way, is hard. In the U.S., when push came to shove, voters turned to the hard right, embodied in Trump and his sprawling ecosystem of grievance, authoritarian populism, and billionaire-backed influence networks. In the U.K., it’s not hard to imagine a similar dynamic emerging in the near future.
Crucially, what’s filling the vacuum left by #neoliberalism is not a return to liberal values. It’s a wholesale political realignment. The liberal centre has, so far, chosen to move toward the “respectable” conservative right, not leftward. Their ideological flight from the left has allowed the far right to become the current primary locus of political imagination.
The question is, will there be a swing to the left? And if so, what kind of left will emerge? Can it be a liberating left, rather than a reactive or technocratic one? Can we imagine a progressive future that is not just a repeat of 20th century social democracy, one that is rooted in new realities, yet grounded in solidarity, care, and the commons?
The neoliberal legacy and the rise of oligarchy. Several speakers traced today’s crisis to the economic architecture of late capitalism. Quantitative Easing (QE), the worship of capital gains, and financial deregulation have created a political economy that favours rentier elitists, tech monopolies, and patriarchal family capitalism. These forces are now shaping politics directly, not just through lobbying, but through ideological control and cultural engineering.
Oil, gas, tech, and finance capital have all converged around a new parasitic oligarchy. This is not the “free market” they pretend to champion, it’s a state-dependent, deeply subsidized regime of asset accumulation. Their “libertarianism” is a mask, when you strip away the rhetoric, you find private capital totally dependent on the state – for subsidies, legal protections, and military-backed global markets. The American right’s political project is to eliminate the centre, cleansing moderate Republicans, capturing courts, weaponizing information systems, and exporting this authoritarian model globally.
Evangelical capitalism: The cultural engine, a key insight from Kristin Kobes Du Mez, is the role of white evangelicalism in this. Far from a sideshow, it forms the emotional and moral backbone of Trumpism. Patriarchal authority, nostalgia, submission to hierarchies, and promises of prosperity through obedience, these values echo through both megachurch sermons and Republican stump speeches.
Multi-level marketing, prosperity gospel, and the language of “blessings” have created a totalizing religious capitalism. It’s self-reinforcing: hard to exit, deeply social, and rooted in fear of the “other.” This is not just religion, it’s political economy, culture, and affect rolled into one. And yes, it’s white evangelicalism as #MLM, it’s a pyramid scam, a con.
Progressive futures are harder than they look, if the right is already moving toward a post-capitalist oligarchy, the left must also imagine post-capitalist futures – but with radically different foundations. Unfortunately, the progressive movement is fragmented, caught between nostalgia for New Deal liberalism and utopian paths with little grounding in material politics.
The chattering classes, policy think tanks, legacy media, technocratic #NGOs still cling to the dream of returning to neoliberal “normalcy”. But this is a dead end. As some panellists noted, even Trump and neoliberalism may not be opposites, but continuations of the same project: one naked, one dressed in civility.
What’s needed now is not a fantasy of restoring the centre, but a real commitment to build something new: grounded in solidarity, regenerative economies, climate realism.
Lessons and questions for the left:
Can progressive movements discipline capital and at a very basic level reengineer markets to serve social goals?
Can we reclaim the state as a tool for collective transformation, or can we do something radically different?
Can we learn from the global South, where post-colonial states have been navigating these contradictions far longer?
And can we build institutions that don’t replicate hierarchy, but still scale power and coordination needed in this globalist mess?
There’s a lesson from history here, progressive eruptions often pull from the past, from older traditions of mutual aid, labour solidarity, cooperative economics, and community defence. We don’t need to invent utopias from scratch, we need to recover the parts that worked, compost the ones that failed, and build with humility and collective care. But we do need to build.
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.
