At best, the old #mainstreaming was about equality in worshipping the #deathcult

The old #mainstreaming was only in a limited way about freedom, so we now need to focus on more on what it was about, equality in obedience. Equality in our blinded worship of the #deathcult: growth, consumption, competition, endless mess on a dying planet.

That’s why #fashernista liberal progressivism is always a dead end problem, it plays radical, says radical, but composts nothing. At best, it sells rebellion as a lifestyle. It’s equality inside the system, not about freedom from it.

We’ve seen this play out a thousand times. Movements rise, fresh and alive, then get polished into campaigns, reports, and consultancy slides. Grassroots becomes “stakeholder.” Vision becomes “strategy.” Change becomes “branding.” All form, no compost. All language, no shared life.

Any real change, living change, means turning the dead weight of institutions, egos, and fear into fertile soil. It’s messy, collective, risky. It doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t chase funding and #NGO approval. It grows because it has to.

That’s what the #OMN (Open Media Network) path is about – composting the old #techshit, the #dotcons, and the NGO decay into something living again. Media that belongs to no one but serves everyone, built on the #4opens.

So the real question is simple. What does real change and challenge look like to you? How do we build it together, in the open, without falling back into the same polite obedience that killed everything before?

The #OMN and the #4opens aren’t abstract ideas, they’re tools for action. If we’re serious about composting the old world into something living, we need hands in the soil, not just words in the air. Here’s how people can start now, from wherever they stand:

#FOSS coding: Build the #openweb, not the #closedweb. Work on #Fediverse tools – join existing native #fashernista projects like Mastodon, PeerTube, Mobilizon, Funkwhale, or the more useful #OMN itself. Fix bugs, improve UI, write docs, or just help test and report issues.

Use the #4opens in practice: No private repos, no hoarding, public decision-making, everyone can use it. Compost old code: take abandoned projects and adapt them. Don’t build shiny new tech for ego points, fix what’s already here. If you’re practical, run small community servers: self-host media, blogs, Fedi instances. Learn how networks breathe.

Then we have social activism, keep it social, messy, and grounded. Form local affinity groups around #openweb media – film nights, repair cafés, public jams. Document everything: record protests, community stories, forgotten spaces.

The next #Indymedia starts with people saying this matters. Challenge control where you see it growing – in meetings, projects, #NGOs, progressive spaces. Ask: is this open? Who holds power here? What’s being hidden? Compost negativity: don’t waste energy on flame wars. Turn frustration into content, conversation, and code.

Avoid the #NGO trap – don’t let money dictate the mission. Use micro-funding and co-ops:
OpenCollective, Liberapay, cooperative hosting. Keep the process/books open: publish budgets, donations, and decisions publicly (#4opens). Value labour differently, not everything needs to be paid. Shared work and mutual aid count as real economy.

Bridging to #NGOs and Institutions but don’t get eaten. Engage, but on your terms, use the #4opens as a boundary tool. If an #NGO don’t work openly, walk away. Offer bridges, not control. Help NGOs learn openness, federate, don’t integrate.

Bring culture into the conversation. Explain why open process and transparency are political acts, not technical choices. Stay autonomous: The moment an institution starts setting your agenda, compost it.

Build the commons, not empires. Everything we do should feed back into the collective soil.
* If you build a tool, make it usable by others.
* If you make media, licence it open.
* If you host something, teach others how to host too.

This is how we win: not through scale, but through replication. Small, self-organizing, composting networks connected through trust. Remember, revolution isn’t about blowing up the system. It’s about composting what’s dead, sharing what’s alive, and keeping the soil open for what’s next.

#openweb #nothingnew #techshit #OMN #fashernista #mainstreaming #deathcult

The Blockchain Socialist: Self-Destruction as Theory

The Blockchain Socialist podcast is the deluded self-destructive talking about the deluded self-destructive in tech. It’s a mirror of our time: intellectuals dissecting the ruins while still worshipping the same #deathcult gods that caused the collapse.

I am listening to an example of this Urbit – about a hardcoded, reactionary tech dream of order built on decentralization, doomed from the start. Not only because the code is bad, but because the culture is. Control disguised as liberation. Hierarchy dressed up as protocol.

This pointless conversation, like so many in the blockchain mess, shows the core #geekproblem: A culture so desperate to escape (old)capitalism that it rebuilds it, line by line, in smart contracts and hard tech algorithms. The people of the blinded tech #deathcult feed on this delusion. Which rewards cleverness over care, abstraction over community, and always, always mistakes power for freedom.

If we want a real alternative, it won’t come from this technocratic dystopias or tokenized cooperation. It will come from composting this mess, from projects grounded in the #4opens, from the living soil of the #openweb, from people who choose the path of trust over control.

Listen to this chattering on the dark enlightenment if you must, but listen as you’d watch decay: as part of the cycle. The old world breaking down so something new can grow.

#OMN #geekproblem #techshit #nothingnew #deathcult

Change is Freedom, Change is Life

You don’t get transformative change by building according to the incentives of the dominant system. A post inspired by rereading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia as part of the Utopia Reading Group in #Oxford

“There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Most people choose the easy path: they find a nice, safe hierarchy and settle in. They obey the rules, repeat the slogans, and mistake obedience for belonging. They stop thinking for themselves. They stop changing.

But change is freedom. Change is life.

Le Guin’s The Dispossessed captures the tension perfectly – between the anarchic, cooperative world of Anarres and the closed, hierarchical planet of Urras. It’s not only a science-fiction metaphor; it’s the current mirror of the #openweb we refuse to look into. The “open” world we imagine is already all around us, fragile, fragile seedlings buried beneath layers of control, ego, and fear.

This is the mess we need to compost, we see it every day. Talented people watching their work and lives being wasted. Good minds submitting to stupid ones. Strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change.

Looking back at web history, think of how #Indymedia burned bright for a moment, then was strangled by internal control and external hostility. Think of how the second reboot – visionOntv on PeerTube – tried to keep that radical history alive, only to collapse again under neglect, lack of support, and the dominance of #dotcons platforms. Ten years of grassroots videos deleted, shadowbanned, or “de-prioritized.” That’s oftern what the suffocation of freedom looks like, not jackboots, but the slow deletion of memory.

Everywhere, the potential for something living and new gets buried under the weight of control. When a grassroots project loses its edge because it’s easier to fit into “funding priorities.” When energy turns to exhaustion, creativity to compliance, rebellion to report-writing. This is the logic of the #deathcult – the slow suffocation of change.

The #deathcult thrives on fear and hierarchy, the illusion that safety comes from control.
It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that the system teaches them not to. Managers, bureaucrats, “leaders” are all terrified of what real openness might unleash.

The banality of obedience. Le Guin warned us that the danger of obedience is not stability, it’s death. Urras, the rich capitalist world, runs on obedience. Anarres, the poor anarchist moon, survives on mutual responsibility.

You can’t get transformative change by operating according to the incentives of that system.
That’s why NGO culture and corporate-funded “innovation” projects always fail the real test.
They replicate the very control structures they claim to challenge.

The composting of culture, the natural world understands what our institutions forget: compost happens whether you want it to or not. What’s dead breaks down, and from that decay, new life takes root.

The same is true for culture and technology. The #dotcons and #closedweb platforms trap creativity and channel it into profit. They turn every act of sharing into data extraction, every connection into surveillance. They turn good minds into “content” and living movements into metrics.

We don’t need more “innovation” within this rot, we need composting. That’s what the #OMN (Open Media Network) is for, taking what’s broken and turning it back into living soil.
A simple, federated network built on the #4opens to grow real, grassroots media again, not as a static structure, but as a breathing, evolving commons.

Revolution is not destruction; it’s renewal. It’s the composting of the dead so that the living may grow. Revolution is our obligation, our hope of evolution.

Choosing life over control, to choose change is to choose life. To cling to control is to choose decay. The #OMN is one path to life, open, messy, collective. The alternative is more of what we already have: talent wasted, good minds ground down, courage strangled.

Le Guin’s lesson still stands:
“You cannot buy the revolution.
You cannot make the revolution.
You can only be the revolution.”

Let’s be that change. Let’s compost the dead systems, and make space for what’s next.

#4opens #openweb #OMN #nothingnew #techshit #deathcult #TheDispossessed #UtopiaReadingGroup

OMN projects are tools for YOU to change and challenge the world we live (and die) in

The Open Media Network (#OMN) is an “anything in, anything out” network powered by a mediated trust system. Instead of one corporation or #NGO controlling the flow, the commernerty decides what happens to the data that moves through it. At its core, the #OMN is a data soup: tagged data objects flowing through channels. These flows are shaped by trust. You consume and share based on your trust relationships, not on algorithms designed to manipulate you.

Key features are built-in, not bugs: Lossy data – it doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful. Redundancy – multiple instances mean resilience, not waste. Trust mediation – human-scale filters that grow communities. The #geekproblem often resists these messy but living dynamics, demanding rigid perfection. But that rigidity kills creativity. The #OMN embraces mess as the fertile ground where culture grows.

The network is built on the normal #FOSS process, #4opens – open data, open source, open process, open standards. Its focus isn’t inventing new shiny toys. It’s about weaving together what already exists into a functioning grassroots media/news commons. Others are free to build their own projects on top of the framework. What’s exciting is the flows of trust that emerge. These aren’t abstract protocols, they’re the living arteries of new communities.

In short: The #OMN is decentralized, trust-based, open by design. It empowers people and communities to take control of media, to create their own flows, their own networks, their own power.

It’s not about serving users.
It’s about empowering people.
It’s not about control.
It’s about trust.

The #OMN is not a product. It’s a shovel. Use it to compost the #deathcult, and grow something alive.

The #OMN is a simple project

For the more geeky – 5 Functions of the #OMN (#5F)

Think of the #OMN as plumbing for media, a system of pipes, holding tanks, and connectors. It’s designed so anyone (not just geeks) can understand and use it. Every site in the network is built from these 5 basic functions:

Link / Subscribe

Plumb a new pipe into the network. A flow of content comes in or goes out. Each pipe can connect to any other function.

Trust / Moderate

Flow passes through a sieve. Trusted content moves smoothly; noise gets filtered. You can send flows straight through, into holding tanks, or split them into new pipes.

Rollback

Empty the tank, rewind a flow, or remove specific objects. Essential for correcting errors, spam, or bad data.

Edit Metadata

Add tags or notes to the “tail” of a data object. Metadata determines how content gets sieved and aggregated. This is the backbone of news curation in the OMN.

Publish

Add new content objects into the flow. Optionally editable. Publishing is just another pipe into the system. At the core sits the storage tank: a simple database holding all the flows.

Nothing new here. This isn’t rocket science – it’s the same way plumbing works, or how power grids function, or how neurons connect in the brain. The #OMN builds on this #nothingnew principle: simple, understandable systems scaled up to empower communities.

UX/UI then sits on top of these 5 functions. That’s the “macro” – the surface layer people touch – but underneath, it’s all just pipes and tanks for flows of data.

#KISS

If you would like and example of what real #DIY activist grassroots media looks like https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/actions/2006/climatecamp/ and https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/actions/2007/climatecamp/ and https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/actions/2008/climatecamp/

We need to reboot this project #indymediaback #OMN #Fediverse

Content in the #OMN

Looking at working with legacy media thinking – silo vs flow

Every so often I answer the out reach calls from more traditional alt/progressive media orgs, let’s look at some of the very illustrative “common sense” knock backs. The recent examples are Freedom’s reaction and Good Internet’s submission call – As their reaction is useful to illustrate the fault line of “radical publishing” in a federated media path.

Here’s a sketch of how it can (and arguably should) work if we’re serious about, #openweb, and soft-communing infrastructure:

Radical publishing vs content marketing

Linking, promiscuous citation, and remixing are not “self-promotion,” they are the currency of commons media. The #deathcult “common sense” (silo good, linking bad) flips this into “spam” because it serves enclosure. A federated media path re-asserts: to link is to share; the work which is often missing is to normalize this against the #geekproblem hostility.

Federated magazine model

Think of Good Internet or Freedom not as final silos but as temporary, themed hubs: Each issue/edition is an editorial filter over the wider #datasoup. Every piece lives in at least two places: Original home (blog, Fediverse post, OMN node, site). Curated home (magazine issue, zine, aggregator). Citation = federation: linking outward is a feature, not a weakness.

Protocols over Silos

ActivityPub / OMN: an article = Note or Article with links, tags, signatures. Bridging: same content can be pulled into Good Internet’s site, Freedom, an OMN feed, or a #p2p archive. Editorial collectives act as curators, not gatekeepers: they federate, contextualize, and remix.

Radical editorial practice

News vs. Narrative: anarchist/left publishers still to often mimic #mainstreaming news style. But radical publishing can foreground process stories (assemblies, conflicts, federations, mistakes) as valuable. The “native common sense” is that embedded links aren’t a vice; they’re a form of solidarity economy. Columns / paths: rather than stand-alone “takes,” recurring voices build a long-form conversation thread across issues.

Overcoming the spam accusation

Transparency: declare openly, “this piece first appeared on hamishcampbell.com – we federate because knowledge is commons.” Reciprocity: every time you link out, you also lift other projects, so the “flow” is visible. Editorial notes: curators can preface with: “We include links because they build the #openweb – federation isn’t promotion, it’s solidarity.”

Practical workflow (2026-ish)

Write a blog/site piece on your own, or community domain (independent anchor). Publish simultaneously to Fediverse (AP Article). Flag it with #OMN metadata (topic, source, tags). Editorial collectives subscribe to flows/feeds – curate into magazine/zine/weekly digest. Federation tools track lineage: where did this piece appear, when, how remixed. Readers move from curated hubs back to source domains (and sideways to other linked nodes).

Why it matters to anarchists

Free software is political; so is free publishing. Federation prevents capture by the #nastyfew – no central owner can throttle which radical voices appear. Linking promiscuously creates a mutual aid economy of attention, the opposite of platform/silo enclosure. Each zine/collective/magazine is an affinity group node; federation = council of nodes. It encodes horizontalism in media.

So when you bump against “not news enough” or “too self-promotional,” that’s the clash between #mainstreaming editorial common sense and federated radical publishing practice. One assumes scarcity (guard the pages); the other assumes abundance (share the flow).

We do need to compost some of this mess #KISS

Let’s build the shovels: #OMN #indymediaback #makeingstory #OGB

In the reboot of native #openweb media, one guiding principle must be clear: #mainstreaming stays second-rank media. That means:

If you can’t link to a working, open URL, you don’t link.

Any mainstream links are placed at the end of the article, not woven in as authority.

This path is #nothingnew, it’s how we held space before. You can see it in practice back in 2006 with Indymedia’s coverage of the Climate Camp: https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/actions/2006/climatecamp/

What does mainstreaming do?

#mainstreaming narrows the field of imagination and excludes non-conforming ideas that could offer real solutions to systemic crises. Mainstreaming smooths the rough edges of society. It normalizes hierarchy, filters dissent, and packages politics into manageable narratives. It’s how radical demands are turned into reforms, then paperwork, then slogans, then forgotten.

Absorbing opposition into bureaucracy (e.g., NGOs, dead end consultancy)

Rewarding compromise and incrementalism, as blocking

Silencing or caricaturing grassroots resistance, as common sense

Making real alternatives seem "unrealistic", in the end

This is why grassroots #DIY matters as a counterbalance. On this path, Anarchism is not just rebellion or chaos, it is a living tradition of thinking and organizing that keeps real change alive when mainstreaming works to bury it.

Direct democracy, In a world of managed participation and elitist mediation, anarchism says: decide together, act together. It reminds us of grassroots power that doesn’t flow through institutions but grows in assemblies, co-ops, camps, and communities.
Mutual aid and cooperation, where mainstream narratives focus on competition, profit, and security through control, anarchism champions care, solidarity, and trust-based networks—a needed cultural shift to navigate crisis and collapse.
Decentralization of power, in the face of #dotcons, technocracy, and corporate-state collusion, anarchism is a map toward decentralization and autonomy. It’s the logic behind federated systems, commons governance, and resilient localism.
Critique of state power, mainstreaming always ends up strengthening state structures, even when it claims to oppose them. Anarchism pulls back the curtain on the violence and coercion baked into “order”, whether in border regimes, policing, or “benevolent” welfare systems.

Cultural compost: “We need anarchists unencumbered by anarchism.” at its best this isn’t an identity, it’s a provocation, a composting force that keeps movements from hardening into systems of control.

This is why balance is key, without radical, un-mainstreamed perspectives, the so-called “left” drifts into hollow #NGO work, tech utopianism, or sanitized liberalism. The #openweb becomes a product instead of a commons, movements become brands, justice becomes PR. Balancing #mainstreaming means, keeping the imagination alive, creating space for alternatives and building systems that don’t replicate domination

In practice, projects like the #OMN and #4opens are examples of this balance: using basic tech to empower trust, not control. They are rooted in values without needing any label, community autonomy, voluntary association, transparent processes.

To reboot the #openweb, we need the cultural DNA of anarchism, without necessarily the costume. We need people unafraid to challenge power, even when everyone else says, “play nice, get the grant, follow the roadmap.” So yes, we need anarchism, not as a lifestyle, but as a counterweight, a cultural inoculation against decay to challenge the centre from the edge.

And we need to compost the rest.

The mess we make trying to move away from the mainstream…

“Doing the same thing in the same context and expecting different results is one of the clinical definitions of insanity.” 😄

This is the core of the #mainstreaming problem. Our hashtags try to name it: #stupidindividualism #deathcult #dotcons #nothingnew in that we repeat the same patterns, inside the same systems, and wonder why nothing changes.

The truth is, we’ve already solved many of these problems. From grassroots media to consensus decision-making, from tech co-ops to decentralized organizing, we had working solutions. What we lacked was a way to scale them without breaking them. That was always the sticking point. But the irony: the activist culture that once created these solutions has eroded, just as the tech finally caught up, the tech is ready, it’s the culture missing. This is the mess we’re in.

It’s about social trust, human-scale processes, messy cooperation, and doing things differently, this time with tools that match our values, not bury them. Let’s stop acting insane, let’s try something new, built from something old, let’s get biblical 😉

Bringing #indymediaback: A Gentle Revival of Radical Media

The old flower beds of #Indymedia lie fallow, not dead. The seeds are still there, beneath layers of neglect, factionalism, and the noise of 20 years of failed “alternatives.” What we need now is not revolution or reinvention, but revival. A slow, careful re-rooting in the fertile ground of experience.

We don’t need to tear it down or rebuild from scratch. Almost all of what worked between 2000–2008 still works today, at least 90% of the original social structure is sound. Let’s focus instead on the missing 10%, the gaps that were never resolved. That’s where the real energy and creativity are needed. That’s where trust, experimentation, and diversity of tactics should guide us.

Change with Care: Soft Hands, Open Eyes – In today’s tech-social landscape, even the slightest structural changes can lead to rips and tears. And once those start, the momentum of destruction escalates. We’ve seen this over and over again: dogmatic reinvention, ego-driven platforms, over-complex redesigns, and every time, we’re left with more fragmentation and less power. Instead, we propose a path of slow change. Work with what already functions. Use the existing structure as a trellis to support new growth.

Let’s be clear:

#4opens is not dogma — it’s the distilled learning of 30 years of open-source and open-process practice.

#PGA Hallmarks are not just ideals — they’re the living legacy of thousands of grassroots organisers across decades and continents.

#Indymedia isn’t a romantic memory — it’s the real-world, working outcome of diverse radical media groups building something that worked.

Indymedia only fell when it forgot the principles it was built on. When the foundations faded, it couldn’t flex under pressure, from internal disagreements or external attack. Let’s not make that mistake again.

Old Tools, New Wisdom – We don’t need saviours with shiny ideas. We need comrades with shovels. We need “elders” who are kind and sharp, who know when to step forward and when to stay quiet. Let’s embrace our role in this: gently holding the centre path, not controlling it. When someone passionate comes forward with a “better” idea, let’s respond with:

“How does that work with the #4opens?”

“Does it move us toward the PGA hallmarks?”

If it does, let’s try it. If not, let’s compost it and try again. That’s the rhythm of real change.

Expect Mess. Build Anyway – Let’s not sugar-coat it. We live in a world collapsing under its own contradictions. #Brexit, #ClimateChaos, the digital enclosure of the commons, these aren’t trends, they’re symptoms of systemic failure. And into that storm, every grassroots effort will be met with confusion, conflict, and co-option.

Expect:

People driven by petty grudges and personal agendas.

NGOs smothering action with managerialism.

#Stupidindividualism hijacking community energy.

Waves of right-wing actors using open platforms better than the left.

The approach: Focus and fertility – The Open Media Network (#OMN) exists to nourish, not replace. It’s a shovel to compost the piles of #techshit and #NGO mess. It’s a network for linking what already works and rediscovering the strength of shared infrastructure.

This is what makes #IndymediaBack different from other “radical” tech revivals?

It’s built on lived practice, not theory.

It’s structured for diversity, not conformity.

It’s based on human trust, not techno-fetishism.

It’s deeply political — anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, rooted in care and collaboration.

Yes, this is slow work, there will be times when things get ugly, when howling mobs throw shit, metaphorically and otherwise. Our job is to stay calm, stay focused, and keep the compost warm. Reviving Indymedia is not about nostalgia. It’s about learning from what worked, and building with care on that foundation. Let’s dig in. Let’s grow something together.

4Opens

Stop throwing regurgitated theory at me: We’re drowning in academic mess

The “common sense” of mainstreaming #deathcult worship is one thing. But a different side, i’m getting bored – and honestly frustrated – with people constantly throwing academic articles and dense theory into conversations about practical grassroots change. If academic knowledge worked in the real world, we wouldn’t be stuck in a permanent state of crisis. We wouldn’t be burning out. We wouldn’t be watching every radical initiative slowly get co-opted, neutralised, then forgotten.

The truth is obvious: most academic frameworks don’t translate well into real-life practice. They to often abstract away the people, the politics, the pain, and the actual doing. And when you try to impose this abstract knowledge onto the messy, complex world of activism, it often backfires. Badly.

Example: The Horizontalist Trap – We’ve all been in those consensus meetings that take hours because someone read a paper on “formal process” and insists we follow it to the letter. The outcome? People walk away frustrated, nothing gets done, and the only ones who benefit are those with time, education, or social power, the exact opposite of what the theory promised.

Example: The NGOization of Resistance – Academics love to talk about power and hegemony, then take funding from the same institutions that perpetuate the problems. They publish papers about “grassroots voice” while never showing up to a single protest, occupation, or food distribution.

Worse still, academic frameworks often become the justification for #NGO “best practices”, which means measurable, fundable, easily controlled deliverables that neuter real resistance and keep everything nice and “professional.” Look at the climate movement’s NGO wing, all form, no fire.

Example: The Misuse of Radical Jargon – Words like “intersectionality,” “decolonisation,” “assemblage,” and “ontology” are thrown around like power spells. But often, they act like a fog machine, confusing, not clarifying. They become tools for gatekeeping rather than building shared understanding.

This isn’t to say these ideas are worthless. But if they aren’t grounded in practice, in lived reality, in #DIY doing, they become another form of control, the academic equivalent of bureaucratic jargon. Empty power.

Let’s Talk About Practice – If you’re serious about radical change, start with what people are actually doing. Watch how trust is built. How disagreements are handled. How collective tools succeed or fail. This is the terrain of useful knowledge. Theory should grow from practice, not the other way around.

This is the basis of the #DIY approach. It’s what grounds #OMN, #IndymediaBack, and the #4opens framework. These projects didn’t come from a PhD thesis, they came from struggle, failure, and iteration on the ground. They work because they grow from practice.

Stop adding to the mess – when you post academic articles without any connection to what’s happening now, in the real world, you’re not helping. You’re contributing to the noise. To the inertia. To the pile of unread PDFs sitting in everyone’s guilt folder.

Instead:

Link to practical guides, not just papers.
Summarise ideas in accessible ways, not just as a show of knowledge.
Relate theory back to what people are already doing.
And most of all, ask first: Is this helping, or is this just feeding my own need to be heard?

We don’t need more theory right now. We need fire, tools, and compost. If you must bring theory, make sure it’s something that came from someone doing the work. Otherwise, maybe save it for the seminar room.

We’re building from the bottom, join us there.

#DIY #NothingNew #4opens #OMN #IndymediaBack #Activism #Compost #OpenWeb #Deathcult

Theory and Practice in Activism

The roadblocks to change are #Stupidindividualism and the #Deathcult that breeds it

If you’ve ever tried to build something radical, collective, and actually useful, you’ve run into strong #blocking forces. They’re not just annoying, they’re dangerous, structural, and they always show up. This post is about naming those, calling them what they are, and understanding how they’re entangled in the wider problem:

A culture that valorizes individualism, feeds on careerism, and bows to the false “common sense” of the neoliberal #deathcult.

The #NGO agenda: Careerism in activist clothing, highlights how too many grassroots projects are co-opted by well-meaning (or not-so-well-meaning) NGOs and their functionaries, who come waving grant forms and talking about partnerships. But really, they’re selling a diluted, bureaucratic version of change that fits inside capitalist institutions, with jobs and funding flows to protect.

At best, they water down radicalism into “deliverables.” At worst, they actively trample grassroots horizontality to build careers. They normalize the #dotcons. They manage, rather than transform. This isn’t conspiracy, it’s structure. And we need to build outside this deadened swamp.

What keeps this hard to see is the petty politics and personal grudges, as micro-level sabotage, let’s be honest, some people would burn the future to win a petty feud. This is the everyday rot of #stupidindividualism, where narrow self-preservation and shallow ego become more important than collective progress.

Projects like #indymediaback, which depend on shared vision and mutual respect, break down when people refuse to grow beyond grudges. These behaviours reflect deeper cultural damage, we’ve been trained to see each other as threats, not collaborators. #KISS we can’t build anything real if we don’t actively mediate this. That means talking it through, holding space, calling it in, before it derails the work.

The liberal trap is about dogma masquerading as “common sense”. I’ll say something unfashionable, I have respect for old-school liberalism. It gave us social safety nets, education, some rights, a lot of good stuff came out of liberal traditions. But today’s dogmatic liberals, clinging to broken institutions and smearing “common sense” over radical action, are a drain on movement energy. Their default is always compromise, always moderation, even when the world is on fire. We’re stuck negotiating with people who believe the future is a reformed version of the past. It isn’t. We need to move forward, not beg to stay where we are.

The #geekproblem is about control, complexity, and disconnection. We’ve talked about this before, and it keeps coming up. The #geekproblem is when technologists build tools for control rather than empowerment, for complexity rather than access, for themselves rather than people. Often dressed in “neutral” language or “perfect systems,” these tools lock out users, deny social context, and kill collaboration with arrogant assumptions. The fix? Build for people, not machines. Use the #4opens. Work from #DIY practice, not just theory. Centre community. Make it work for the bottom, not only the top.

The path we need is compost isn’t about perfection. We need to admit we’ve all played roles in the mess. The key is naming it, owning it, and moving differently. Tools like #OMN, #indymediaback, and #OGB are not ONLY shiny new things. They’re grounded in lived practice, built to solve real problems. They don’t pretend to be magic fixes, they are basic shovels, to compost the current mess, to old space to grow something better.

Let’s get on with composting the #tecsit. We don’t need another app, another platform, another paper. We need to build trust-based networks, support each other, and get our hands dirty together. If we work for it, a humanistic future is still possible, to make this happen we need to stop feeding the #deathcult and start feeding the soil.

Add your thoughts in the comments: What Blocks the progressive path? We need to name these issues clearly, not to shame individuals, but to make them visible as systemic patterns we all get caught in. So tell me: what else is holding us back? What sabotages collective projects from within? Let’s document the patterns so we can start composting them.

#grassroots #DIY #openweb #4opens #nothingnew #postcapitalism #stupidindividualism #culturewars #commoning

Theory and Practice in Activism

There’s a common confusion, pushed by well-meaning #fashernistas, about how change actually happens. They love theory. They love to talk about change. But when it comes to doing, things go sideways. Why? Because good horizontalists know: theory must emerge from practice, not the other way around.

At the root of radical practice is #DIY culture. We don’t wait for perfect theory or academic approval. We get our hands dirty. We try things, we fail, we try again. Through this, we build theory that is grounded in reality, not floating above it.

The Problem with top-down theory is that when you start from theory alone, disconnected from lived experience, you go ground and round in abstract circles. Then, inevitably, someone tries to apply this neatly wrapped theoretical package as a “solution” to the mess we’re in… and it breaks everything.

At best, this leads to another layer of #techshit to compost. At worst, it becomes academic wank, beautifully phrased but practically useless, imposed on grassroots organisers trying to get real work done. We’re tired of clearing up after these failed interventions. Focus matters. Resources are scarce. Energy is precious. The practice-first approach, is why we’re doing something different with projects like:

#OMN (Open Media Network): building tools from the bottom up, with open metadata flows and radical trust.

#Indymediaback: rebooting a proven model of grassroots publishing that worked, updated for today.

#OGB (Open Governance Body): prototyping governance based on lived collaboration, not abstract debate.

All of this is theory grown from practice. None of it came from think tanks or grant-funded consultants. It came from kitchens, camps, squats, TAZs, mailing lists, and dirty hands. If you want to be part of this work, great. But please engage with it as it is. Bring your experience, your skills, your curiosity. But don’t dump disconnected theory on it. Don’t smother the flow with top-down frameworks or overthought abstractions.

We need people to join the flow of practice. Let the theory emerge where it’s needed, like compost, growing what feeds us. So: Start where your feet are. Build from what works. Trust the process of doing. And please, don’t push mess our way. We’ve got enough of that already.

Let’s build something real. Together.

#DIY #grassroots #4opens #KISS #deathcult #nothingnew

Why most radical tech is pointless, and why #indymediaback isn’t

Almost everything built in today’s alt-radical tech scene is, bluntly, pointless. Despite good intentions, most of it ends up feeding the endless cycle of #fashernista churn, flashy new platforms, bleeding-edge protocols, or encrypted communication tools nobody uses, built by isolated teams disconnected from real-world needs or history. This is the #geekproblem: a culture where novelty is fetishized, and social usefulness is an afterthought, if it appears at all.

Examples:

Secure scrolling tools: Every few months we see new chat apps, usually cryptographic fortresses with no communities. No one’s asking what these tools are for beyond vague abstractions like “privacy” or “freedom.” Tools without context.
Peer-to-peer silos: Projects like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) or many DAT spin-offs build entirely new social ecosystems that demand complete buy-in, rather than integrate into existing networks. What results is islands of lonely idealists yelling into empty timelines.
Protocol over people: Many Fediverse projects argue endlessly over specs like #ActivityPub or #Nostr, often prioritizing purity over pragmatism. What good is a protocol if no one actually uses it beyond a few devs congratulating themselves?

Why #indymediaback isn’t a pointless tech project, it offers something truly different. It is not “new.” It doesn’t pretend to invent a whole new ecosystem. It is an act of digital memory, a revival of the still-needed infrastructure that once helped build radical networks globally. #Indymedia worked. It published resistance. It distributed power. It was embedded in real communities and real movements. This is #nothingnew done right.

The #nothingnew approach mediates against the churn by reusing workflows, social trust, and existing cultural practices. It doesn’t ignore tech, it grounds tech. Examples:

#indymediaback uses simple publish-form-comment workflows, already familiar. No #AI, no #blockchain, no obscure identity layer. Just people posting and curating stories.

It connects to existing radical spaces: housing co-ops, street kitchens, climate camps—places where digital tools are needed right now, and where the point isn’t building a unicorn startup but having a place to publish the truth when the cops are lying again.

Why copying #dotcons isn’t enough, in the #fediverse we so far have replicate Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram — Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed. This is useful, to a point. But all code is ideology. Copying capitalist infrastructure dose smuggle in capitalist logic. Copying invites the #deathcult right back in through the side door.

indymediaback avoids this trap. It doesn’t replicate any#dotcons logic or UX patterns. It revives a publishing common that worked before Silicon Valley captured this path. And more importantly, it’s embedded in a set of radical social practices: the #PGA hallmarks, the #4opens, and the messy, beautiful legacy of grassroots movements who already knew how to organize.

The value of #indymediaback isn’t just in tech. It’s in trust-based social continuity, the hidden glue of any working movement. Without this, you don’t have a radical tech project. You have a ghost repo on GitHub. That’s the central point, without real community, without continuity, without trust, radical tech is a dead end.

This is the carrot and stick we need now. If you care about the #openweb as a human value network, not just a protocol playground, you have to build things people can use today, and that people want to use, not because it’s encrypted or federated, but because it serves a purpose they already have.

This is where the wider #OMN (Open Media Network) comes in. It’s not another protocol war. It’s a shovel to compost the inhuman mess we’ve inherited. It’s a framework built with the #4opens, to grow digital commons that don’t depend on VC, control freaks, or fashion. It’s where we build bridges between radical tech projects, rather than isolate ourselves in yet another Git-based castle.

In short, it’s a path of people over product, process over platform. We don’t need more “solutions.” We need to stop being prats, pick up the tools we already have, and start rebuilding.

Food for thought, and action.

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

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

Hard right talking points:

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the hard right

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

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

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