“After hundreds of millennia in which all humans had direct access to the commons, it took only a few centuries… to cut off the vast majority of people on Earth from direct access to the means of economic production and therefore to rob them of the power to say no. It took only a few generations to convince most people that this situation was natural and inevitable. That false lesson needs to be unlearned.”
The starting point is simple, Marx was right about many things. From a commons perspective, Marx understood something fundamental. Capitalism is not just a collection of individual choices and isolated market transactions. It is a system built around extraction, enclosure and the concentration of power. He understood that capitalism emerged through the destruction of older commons systems – taking land, resources and social relationships that had been collectively managed and turning them into private property, commodities and sources of profit.
And, the enclosure of the commons was not simply an economic change, it was a social transformation. People were separated from direct access to the means of survival and production. They became dependent on selling their labour within a system they did not control. With this in mid, the question for the #OMN, is not only “What is wrong with capitalism?” that question is important, but it is not enough. The deeper question is “What kind of structures can replace it without recreating the same problems in a different form?” This is where history, and our projects, becomes complicated.
Capitalism’s contradictions – Marx identified contradictions inside capitalism that remain visible today. The drive for endless accumulation, competition, overproduction and the pressure on profit all create instability. The interesting thing is not that capitalism avoided these contradictions, it did not, instead, capitalism adapted. The state became part of the survival mechanism, financial intervention, corporate subsidies, public spending, monetary policy and crisis management became ways of moving contradictions around rather than resolving them.
The destruction of the commons was not simply progress, it was a loss of social capacity. Communities lost direct relationships with land, production and decision-making, people lost the ability to say no because the alternatives had been enclosed.
The current system survives not because it solved its problems, but because it continually transforms them. The #deathcult adapts, capitalism is good at absorbing criticism, turning challenges into new markets and changing shape while maintaining the underlying logic: growth, extraction and accumulation.
The problem of capturing power – Marx understood that states are often captured by powerful interests, his answer was that the working class should take control of the state and use it as a tool of transformation. The problem is that power does not become harmless simply because different people hold it, a system designed around centralised power tends to attract people who understand and seek centralised power.
The history of the 20th century showed the dangers of this as temporary emergency powers have a tendency to become permanent structures. The promise that authority will eventually disappear is harder to achieve than the promise suggests. This is where the commons’ tradition offers a different starting point, the question then becomes – How do we build systems where power is distributed from the beginning? Not after a revolution, not after someone promises to give power back, now.
Means shape ends, a decentralised, participatory society cannot be built through centralised and authoritarian methods. If the process is based on hierarchy, control and obedience, then the destination carries those same patterns. This is why the commons connects with the libertarian traditions within Marxism, anarchism and movements such as the Paris Commune. The most interesting Marx is often the later Marx, the Marx who became more interested in communal ownership, local organisation and different forms of social production outside the Western industrial model. That Marx is much closer to commons thinking.
Ownership is not enough, a common mistake is to think the problem is only who owns production. Private ownership creates problems, but replacing private ownership with state ownership does not automatically create liberation. A factory owned by the state can still destroy ecosystems, a planned economy can still pursue endless growth.
The deeper question is – What is production for? Capitalism has a built-in requirement, money must become more money, production must expand, markets must grow, but the biosphere has limits. The #climatechaos era makes this impossible to ignore. A system that requires endless expansion inside a finite ecosystem contains a fundamental contradiction. The challenge is not simply changing ownership, it is changing the relationship between humans, technology, production and the living world.
The violence of extraction – capitalism treats value through exchange. Things matter because they can be turned into commodities. This creates a dangerous relationship with the natural world as forests become timber, rivers become sewers, animals become production units, land becomes an investment and life becomes something measured by economic usefulness.
When ecosystems cannot be made profitable, they are treated as obstacles rather than living systems with their own value. This logic spreads into human relationships, over the last 50 years people are increasingly judged through productivity, economic contribution and market value.
The problem is not individual greed alone, the problem is a system that rewards extraction. The question is not whether some people are good or bad, it is what kinds of behaviour the system encourages.
The commons ask a different question, not “Who controls the machine?” But “How do we build systems where nobody can easily capture the machine?” This is where the #4opens matters. The #4opens are not just a technical checklist, they are social infrastructure.
Open process.
Open data.
Open source.
Open standards.
They create transparency, participation and the ability for communities to understand and shape the systems they depend on. The goal is not simply to seize existing structures, it is to build different structures. Revolution as compost to grow alternatives in the cracks. The current crisis is also a crisis of social organisation as change is no longer only organised through traditional institutions. It moves through networks, data, attention and shared platforms.
Building commons, networks and shared memory, creating systems that survive beyond personalities, leaders and moments of attention. From individuals back to collectives, the commons is not one path where everyone must agree, it is a space where many paths can grow together. Diversity is not a problem to solve, it is the resilience.
The commons and climate responsibility – People often say “Humans are to blame for climate change.” But which humans? The responsibility is not evenly distributed, some actors have created far more extraction, pollution and destruction than others. The problem is not humanity, the problem is a particular way of organising human activity.
Keep in mid when building what comes next – capitalism extracts – authoritarian socialism centralises – the commons try to do something different by building power that belongs to everyone and cannot easily be taken away. This task is not to find a perfect blueprint, it is to grow living systems that are adaptable, transparent and rooted in participation. The #OMN, #openweb, #fediverse, #OGB, #indymediaback and #4opens ideas all come from this path.
Not replacing one hierarchy with another, not creating another machine for someone else to control we need to be building commons, trust, collective capacity. The future will not come from waiting for a better version of the existing system, it comes from growing alternatives that make the existing system less necessary.
It is your ability to discern facts that make you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a tyrant.
The #openweb needs this balance: people with the freedom to question, investigate and challenge – and communities with the shared trust to build together.
Without critical individuals we get conformity. Without common knowledge we get fragmentation. Democracy needs both: curiosity and commons.
A red warning for extreme heat has been issued across parts of the UK this week, including London. For people this heatwave across Europe feels frightening, not because of the temperatures themselves, but of what they imply. Nights stay hot, bodies don’t recover, systems don’t cool down. The baseline is shifting. The question that keeps coming up is simple and unavoidable – if this is what it’s like now, what is it like in 10, 20, 30 years? The answer is not uncertain, it is more heat, more extremes, more instability. There is no “new normal” coming, there is only escalating #climatechaos.
A #deathcult sect for the last 40 years was not built to survive itself, we are seeing this now, the infrastructure is failing. Hospitals, transport systems, housing, food networks – all were built for a climate that no longer exists. Even basic adaptation like cooling is uneven, fragile, and socially unequal. Some workplaces fail under heat stress. Some people have no protection at all. And crucially, we are still not adapting at the scale required.
The UK Climate Change Committee has already said it clearly, adaptation is too slow, stalled, or moving in the wrong direction. That is not a warning about the future, it is a #KISS description of failure in the present. The denial loop over the last 20 years is why we are in such a mess, the pattern is now obvious:
Scientists warn
Media briefly reports
Heat passes
Politics resets to “normal”
Nothing changes
This cycle repeats while emissions continue and global temperatures rise toward 2–3°C and beyond this century. But bland media coverage hides the issues of extremes – heatwaves, floods, droughts, system shocks. And those are already exceeding earlier projections in many regions. Timid climate models underestimating reality due to feedback loops, jet stream disruption, aerosol reduction effects, and regional amplification. We are not just entering a warmer world, we are entering a more unstable one.
Knock-on effects are the real ongoing crisis, the danger is not only heat, it is cascading system failure:
food production under stress
rising prices and political instability
insurance withdrawal from entire regions
economic shocks from simultaneous disasters
infrastructure collapse under compounding extremes
This will obviously trigger the most severe global financial instability in modern history. And then there are the wildcard risks – #WAMOC weakening or collapse, Amazon dieback leading to abrupt regional climate shifts. It is not just science fiction, they are known systemic risks inside a destabilising ecological earth system.
One thing we need to talk about and be more clear on is #climatechaos is #classwar. This mess is not experienced equally, the rich (most of the #nastyfew) up to a point when they die of old age can adapt individually, with industrial air conditioning, private infrastructure, relocation options to second homes in safer climates. While everyone else absorbs the breakdown of overheated housing, unsafe work conditions, failing public services and the resulting rising costs of survival.
This is why #climatechaos is also a strong class issue, the crisis is not just physical, it is political due to the visible distribution of risk and protection. After ten years of warnings, many of us were already naming this:
At the time it was still framed as prediction, now it is reality. The uncomfortable truth is not that we were wrong, it is that nothing meaningful was done at scale. One thing we have learned, that we understand more clearly now is it is not an information problem, it’s a systems’ problem.
Extraction-based economies cannot easily respond to limits
Attention-based media cannot communicate slow crisis
Electoral politics cannot act on long time horizons
So the system produces delay, distraction, and denial even as conditions worsen. There is a strong role of the #dotcons in this mess as the big social media platforms have intensify this failure. They spent the last ten year optimise for outrage, fragmentation, consumption and finally forgetting. Crisis becomes a series of disconnected moments rather than a shared progressive long-term struggle. Each event resets attention to zero, memory does not accumulate. This is not an accident – it is structural.
Why #4opens matters now, becomes more important, not less, this is not the normal #mainstreaming liberal ideology. It is #KISS basic resilience infrastructure, as surviving #climatechaos requires collective intelligence that can persist across time, crises, and institutional failure, we need tecnolagy like the #OMN that can help medate this:
Closed systems concentrate control.
Open systems distribute survival capacity.
But under all this the missing layer is meaning, one of the biggest underestimates from the last decade is psychological – people are not only resisting facts, they are defending meaning – belief in control, belief in technological rescue, belief in stability returning. But these #mainstreaming stories no longer match reality, but this denial persists, not because people don’t know, but because they cannot yet replace the blinded liberal stories. This is where change actually happens,not just information, but shared meaning and practice.
What changes now? Ten years ago the message was, stop feeding the system causing the crisis, now the message is build the systems that can survive what is already here. That means:
The point is not purity of language, its growing commons of action and hashtags are a tool for this.
As we see today, we are not approaching #climatechaos, we are inside it. The urgent question now is whether we can build systems – social, technical, and cultural – that can function while it unfolds or we keep letting things fail.
That is the #OMN challenge, and it is already overdue.
Let’s be clear on the background mess, before the personal attacks start, this is not about individuals. It is about patterns, systems and ideas. The danger is that criticism becomes an #adHominem argument – “you just dislike this because…” – instead of looking at the actual structures being discussed.
The point I am making is that parts of dead #postmodern thinking have ended up embedded inside #neoliberal culture: fragmentation, individual identity, endless discourse and difficulty building any shared collective action. That does not mean every idea, person or piece of work in those spaces is the same, it means we need to look at how ideas interact with power.
The question is – What helps us build collective capacity in a time of #climatechaos, inequality and the #dotcons mess? What creates commons? What creates shared action? This is the conversation.
So with that in mind lets look at the major problem with the #dotcons attention economy the advertising model. The platform logic and the attention economy are now becoming harder to simply ignore. For most of mass media history, the commercial transformation of media was hidden behind a layer of journalism, culture and public value. The advertising model was presented as simply a way to pay for content. Platforms were presented as neutral spaces for communication. Algorithms were presented as tools to help people discover what mattered.
But the #dotcons direction has now stripped this bare – the direction has become clearer, the media landscape looks less like a place for shared knowledge and more like a shopping catalogue with occasional content attached. The focus is no longer even the fig leaf of informing people, connecting communities or building public understanding. The naked goal is simple – more clicks, more engagement, more time captured, more data collected and more consumption encouraged. This is the logic of the #dotcons.
The problem with this #deathcult worshipping mess is not only that companies make money. The deeper problem is that the structures built around making money reshape our culture itself. When attention becomes the product, everything starts being measured through extraction. A story is only valuable because it generates traffic – A person is only valuable because they generate data – A community is valuable because it creates engagement – A conversation is valuable because it keeps people inside the platforms. Any, social value gets pushed aside.
The original #openweb grew from a different idea. People built websites, forums, mailing lists, software projects and communities because they wanted to share, collaborate and create. The value was not only in the information produced, the value was in the surrounding relationships. People corrected each other, developed trust, knowledge was maintained collectively.
The internet worked because there was social infrastructure around the technical infrastructure. The mess we made, was thinking that communication could simply be handed over to commercial platforms without catastrophic changing the nature of communication itself. A platform is not just a tool, it comes with incentives, has owners, rules, a business model. When every space becomes a marketplace, the culture changes.
The mess we have made is that extraction replaces participation, the #dotcons path works by turning human activity into resources. People create, platforms capture. Communities produce culture, companies monetise attention. That extraction eventually damages the thing being extracted from, creators become exhausted, communities fragmented, trust declines as people become audiences instead of participants.
The internet becomes full of “content”, but much poorer in meaning, more information does not automatically create more knowledge, more communication does not automatically create better communities, without care, context and collective responsibility, abundance becomes noise. To compost this mess we have made in the media tech path – the question is not “How do we get more people producing?” The question is “How do we build systems where what people produce strengthens the commons instead of feeding extraction?”
The fashionable people of #AI are pushing at changing the scale of content creation, lowering barriers to producing books, apps, music, legal documents and academic papers. Thus, “output” is exploding. But the #OMN second question is what happens when production grows faster than the ability to filter, discuss, trust and maintain? More books, but more noise, More apps, but more clutter. More papers, more pressure on review systems, more music, but harder to value human creativity.
The #dotcons logic says: more content = more value. The #openweb lesson is different – value comes from communities, trust, context and care. We don’t just need more production, we need better commons, better mediation and better ways to separate signal from noise.
The current wave of generative AI (#GenAI) is presented as inevitable, the message is everywhere: adapt, adopt, integrate, or be left behind. But technology is not neutral, as every tool carries assumptions – who benefits, who controls, what values are embedded, and what damage is accepted as “the price of progress”.
From a #OMN perspective, the question is not simply “can this technology do impressive things?” Of course, it can. The question is what kind of society does this technology build? Does it strengthen human creativity, collective intelligence and open participation? Or does it deepen the existing #dotcons path of centralisation, extraction, dependency and enclosure? The promise and the reality of large language models (#LLM) represent a technical development, they can summarise information, translate languages, generate text, assist coding, and help people interact with large amounts of information. These are real, if floored capabilities.
But the current #techshit hype jumps from useful assistance to much bigger claims: that these systems will replace expertise, solve social problems, revolutionise education, transform science, and create a better future. This is currently not true, and, on the LLM path will never be true as the current GenAI systems do not understand the world. They generate likely patterns based on huge amounts of training data. They do not know truth from falsehood, meaning from appearance, or ethics from probability, a convincing answer is not the same as a system that understands. This matters because the native #openweb was built on a different idea, that knowledge comes from people, communities, discussion, correction and shared responsibility.
The #geekproblem is confusing capability with wisdom is a recurring problem in technology culture – it is the assumption that if something can be built, it should be built. The technical question becomes “Can we?” while the social question “Should we?” gets pushed aside. This is part of what #OMN calls the #geekproblem – the tendency to reduce complex social questions into technical problems. A better search algorithm does not automatically create a healthier information system, a faster way to generate content does not automatically create better knowledge. More automation does not automatically create more freedom. The missing piece is the social context around the technology.
Then we come to the ecological cost of scaling, the current GenAI boom depends on enormous infrastructure. In the era of out of control #climatechaos data centres require huge amounts of electricity, water for cooling, specialised hardware, constant replacement cycles leading to massive extraction of resources. At a time of #climatechaos, we should be asking whether increasing consumption is the only path available.
The lesson is not that technology is bad, the lesson is that technology without social responsibility becomes a tool for whoever already has power. The question is not “how do we make AI bigger?” more it is how do we make technology serve human communities rather than making communities serve technology control systems, it is about who controls. The current dominant systems are owned by a few powerful companies controlled by the #nastyfew actively working to destroy our ecology and societies.
The future is not decided by whether we use AI, it is decided by whether we allow the same old #dotcons logic to shape every new technology. The work remains the same to build alternatives, keep processes open, grow the commons. The answer is not simply rejecting technology, the #openweb has never been anti-technology. The question is what kind of technology grows from what kind of culture. We need tools that strengthen human networks, not replace them. Tools that support commons, not enclosure, that increase agency, not dependency.
If we change this can there be an ethical AI? A socially useful technology? Possibly, but it would require a very different path, it would need many of the things the #openweb has argued for from the beginning.
The current mess and tragedy is that the tools we need most are often the first things that stressed, messy, #elitist systems defund, discredit, and dismantle. Why? Because these tools threaten the psychological certainty that people cling to when the world feels unstable. The ability to sit with uncertainty, to question assumptions, to admit complexity. These are not weaknesses, they are survival tools.
Yes, this is a mess we need to compost, the #nothingnew path to work on this is about recovering tools we already know work: science’s methods, hypothesis testing, falsifiability, uncertainty management, peer review, and collective correction. These are cultural technologies for thinking beyond the current #blocking immediate tribal reactions. They are systems designed around humility – the understanding that reality is bigger than any one person’s story.
In #OMN terms projects like #indymediaback, #OGB and #makeinghistory are the toolkits that can help us escape psychological traps, not by removing fear, fear is part of being human, but by building social paths strong enough to keep working even when the humans walking them are scared.
Psychological safety only works in ecological surplus, long-term joined-up thinking requires this psychological safety, when we have a surplus, a system has enough resources, so that it can experiment, adapt, and invest in the future. When a system is stressed, like we are today everything collapses towards survival thinking and behaver. This is why stressed societies underinvest in care, research, education, community, and long-term thinking. They marginalise the people doing this work and punish institutions trying to protect it. One of the resigns why the prophet is often stoned.
The hard right’s politics of scarcity – real or manufactured – creates cognitive narrowing. As people feel under constant threat, attention focuses on immediate danger, planning horizons shrink, outsiders become threats, complexity becomes suspicious. Cultures shaped by generations of insecurity carry this short-term thinking into institutions, mythology, and identity. It becomes the “common sense” in that everyone unthinkingly believes in. After 50 years of worshipping the #deathcult of endless extraction, competition, growth and profit above everything else, our societys and ecologys are fragile. And this is exactly when collapse pressure increases, the things that looked inefficient during growth become survival-critical – Diversity – Redundancy – Resilience – Commons.
The #OMN approach has always been that messy diversity is not waste, rather a core to living survival. So why do people still block this to cling to the broken paths? Humans know they will die, it creates a deep existential pressure that cultures have always tried to manage. Worldviews, communities, identities and belief systems become anxiety buffers. When those are threatened, people do not always become more rational. Often they become more defensive, double down, they become more attached to the group that gives them meaning.
This is why authoritarian paths grow during periods of fear – stronger hierarchy, tighter in-groups, scapegoating, magical thinking, blinded rigidity. The response to uncertainty becomes control, but control is not the same as resilience. Were the #openweb alternative is to often pushed away, it becomes a challenge, to build cultures that can handle uncertainty without collapsing into fear. And why It’s so hard to grow the needed open processes, shared knowledge, trust networks, collective problem-solving, and spaces where disagreement can happen without destroying the commons.
And we have people to do this – the reserve army “problem” – Capitalism creates its own insecurity, it structurally requires a group of people who are not fully included in production. The unhoused, precariously employed, unemployed, migrants and marginalised communities. They are treated as failures of the system, but from a structural perspective, precarity is useful to the mainstreaming. A population living with insecurity disciplines everyone else, it tells workers to accept worse conditions, less power and less control. Because someone else can replace you.
The #4opens can be a part of composting this, not because openness magically fixes everything, but because transparency, participation, and accountability are tools for keeping power visible. The #OMN path is about growing these social technologies alongside existing technical ones. In this the work is not to pretend fear does not exist. The answer is to build paths where fear does not become the organising principle. So we have real social groups to compost authoritarian thinking, scarcity politics, scapegoating, magical solutions, and the idea that domination is the only realistic path.
The future needs different seeds, the precarity, #openweb, #OMN, #4opens and other commons-based paths are parts of that wider work. The question is not whether the old system can continue forever, it is what are we growing while it cannot?
The thing about #techbro culture is that some of the most #elitists people grew up loving stories that warned us about the #techshit they are building. They read the dystopias, watched the films, they understood the dangers of unchecked capital, concentrated power, surveillance, artificial intelligence, inequality, and corporate control.
Then many of them decided “Great idea. Let’s build it.” as the #geekproblem made them think they knew better. This is what our #fashionista class call the #tormentnexus problem – the moment when a warning about a future goes wrong becomes interpreted as a blueprint for that future. The issue is not that people like technology, science fiction, fantasy, or engineering. The #openweb itself grew from people who loved exploring what technology could make possible. The problem is when technical possibility becomes separated from social consequence.
A story like Dune is not simply about a powerful individual changing history. It is a warning about charismatic power, messianic thinking, and the danger of believing one person can control complex systems. A story like Snow Crash is not just a cool vision of virtual worlds. It is a satire of corporate fragmentation, private control, and a society where everything becomes a service. A story like Blade Runner is not simply a stylish future aesthetic. It asks what happens when technology creates beings and systems that challenge our ideas of humanity, rights, and exploitation.
But our blinded #mainstreaming started removing the politics from the stories. They kept the shiny machines, they kept the aesthetics, the power fantasies. They discarded the warnings, the #geekproblem is about capability without consequence. A recurring problem in technology culture is that engineering thinking often asks:“Can we build this?” That is an important question, but society has to ask “Should we build this?” And “Who benefits?” And “What happens to the people who have no power in this system?”.
The #geekproblem is not that engineers are bad people. It is the cultural mistake of believing technical problems can be separated from social reality. A better algorithm will not automatically solve inequality, more data will not automatically create wisdom, more automation will not automatically create freedom.
The blinded #geekproblem myth of the chosen builder, is another pattern that appears again and again. The people building these systems imagine themselves as the exception, the story says “Yes, this technology could be dangerous in the wrong hands, but I am different, I will use it responsibly.” This is the same #elitists fantasy that many cautionary stories warn against.
A system can be technically brilliant and socially destructive, the history of technology is full of examples where innovation created new problems alongside the solutions. The factory increased production but created new forms of exploitation, the car increased mobility but reshaped cities around machines. #dotcons social media connected people but also created control, surveillance, manipulation, and attention extraction. The question is never only what technology can do, the question is what kind of society technology grows.
The problem is not bad individuals, though they exist. The problem is social and economic paths that concentrate power and reduce accountability. The danger is not only the evil ruler, more it’s creating structures where rulers become inevitable. This is why the #openweb matters, real power is not finding a better king, it is building #KISS systems where power is distributed, visible, and accountable.
Our current worship of capital rewards the wrong interpretation, is another uncomfortable part of this. The market rewards the most dangerous reading of a story. The cautionary version says “Maybe we should not build this because it creates harm.” The investment version says “Can we build it faster than everyone else?” The version that creates companies, funding rounds, patents, and control is usually the one that wins. The result is that technology is shaped by incentives that favour scale, speed, and ownership. Not care, community, resilience or long-term social health. This is the mess we need to compost to not end up with a world where the same systems criticised in dystopian fiction become business opportunities.
The missing piece is growing the commons, not with anti-technology (the wrong lesson) – The answer is technology embedded in social systems that understand responsibility. This is where the original #openweb ideas matter – growing from open processes, transparent development, shared ownership, community governance and public interest infrastructure. The lesson of #FOSS was never simply “Anyone can copy the code.” The deeper lesson was “People can collectively build and maintain things outside pure market logic.”
It should be obverse that the technical commons will need social commons, without that, open code can still become captured by closed paths. The solution is the challenge for projects like #OMN, #OGB, #4opens, and #indymediaback – not to reject technology – to keep asking a different question not “How do we build the next big thing?” but “How do we build things that help people build together?”
The future does not need more isolated #eletist builders trying to control complexity, it needs communities capable of navigating complexity. The opposite of the #tormentnexus is not rejecting technology, its is more about creating technology where the social relationships come first.
The #openweb was never just about protocols, federation is technical – a commons is social. The work now is making sure we do not build the dystopias our own stories spent decades warning us about. The warning signs are there, the question is whether we listen.
Building beyond the #deathcult – Our current model of #tech funding and developer agendas is not neutral. The way we fund technology shapes the kind of technology we build. For the last 20 years, the dominant tech culture has followed the same path:
venture capital growth
platform monopolies
extraction of attention and data
endless scaling
short-term metrics
private ownership of public infrastructure
This has produced #techshit – technology built because it can make money, not because it improves society. And now we are facing an era of #climatechaos, ecological breakdown, and social instability. The question we have to ask is uncomfortable – Has our current model of technology funding become part of the problem?
The answer cannot simply be “more innovation”, we have had decades of innovation. The problem is that innovation has been pointed in the wrong direction. The #openweb and #FOSS communities contain many of the seeds of a different path, but we still fall into the same trap of building tools to optimise code, solve technical problems, but we struggle with the social question of how do we build and sustain commons?
This is the #geekproblem, not that technical people are bad, not that code does not matter. But that we treat social systems as if they are just technical systems waiting to be fixed. They are not: A community is not a server, a movement is not a repository, a network is not just infrastructure. The missing piece is grassroots funding models that support the social work around technology.
What could grassroots tech funding look like? Instead of asking “How can we create the next unicorn?” Ask “How do we support useful things that communities actually need?” This means funding – Maintenance, not just invention as a huge amount of valuable #FOSS work is boring. Keeping things running, helping users, writing documentation and supporting communities to do governance. This is invisible labour, but it is what keeps the commons alive.
We need networks, not just products, the #dotcons model asks “What is the product?” The #openweb question should be “What relationships are we strengthening?” On this native path, funding needs to support ecosystems, not just individual projects. Long-term contribution, not short-term growth.
A grassroots project does not need to become a company, it might need small sustainable funding, shared infrastructure, community support, public accountability with open processes. Growth is not always success, sometimes resilience is success. Funding the gaps between technology and society – The hardest work is often translation by helping activists use tools, developers understand communities, so communities can shape technology.
This is where #OMN sits, not just making software, but more importantly building the social infrastructure around software. The hardest problem is cultural, the block is not only money. The block is “common sense”, living inside a #neoliberal idea where something is only useful if it produces financial return. Anything outside that looks interesting but “unrealistic”.
The #deathcult assumption is if it cannot become a profitable business, it has no value. But the internet itself was not built this way, the #openweb grew from public investment, shared knowledge, volunteer contribution, and communities building things because they mattered. We need to recover that thinking, but to breaking out of the cycle is difficult because it requires changing what we measure.
Not, how much money did this make? But how much capacity did this create? How many people can now participate? How much commons did we grow and how much power moved away from concentrated systems?
The challenge for #OMN, #OGB, #4opens and #indymediaback is not only technical. It is creating a different economic imagination, a way of funding technology that helps communities grow instead of helping platforms extract.
The future will not be built only by companies, it will be built by people creating alternatives together.
To make this path work we need a hand reaching back across the gap – Stepping away from the #dotcons is not a simple a moral judgment to jump from one world to another. A native path is one foot in, one foot out. To stay connected enough to understand where people are, what they need, and how they think – while building alternatives that move beyond the worship of the #deathcult.
The hand reaches back across the gap, not to pull people into the past, but to help people cross into something different, change does not happen by shouting from the other side. It happens by building bridges while growing the new.
So the question is: why are so many people not acting? In the era of #climatechaos, people #blocking social change in society and technology are not just slowing things down, they are helping maintain systems that are driving social and ecological breakdown.
The question is not only what is wrong, more what are we building instead? Different paths already exist with the #4opens, #penweb, #OGB, #indymediaback and wider #OMN projects. These are paths to move away from the failures of #mainstreaming and towards more open, collective ways of organising.
There is no profit in this for us, we are not building this to cash out. So maybe the more useful question is not “What’s the agenda?” Maybe ask – Who benefits when alternatives never get built People often look for who gains from creating something. But power also exists in maintaining the status quo.
The #openweb has always been about creating spaces outside the usual incentives – spaces based on sharing, participation, and collective ownership. That threatens systems built on keeping things closed, controlled, and dependent.
The challenge is mediation, how do we separate signal from noise? How do we build alternatives while people are still trapped inside the old systems? How do we create spaces where change can actually happen?
One foot in – One foot out – A hand across the gap.
Don’t become part of the blockage, help build the bridge.
One of the uncomfortable truths of activism is that, given a choice between anarchism and anarchy, many anarchists choose anarchism. The ideology, identity, culture, meetings, and certainties feel safer than taking a genuinely risky step into the unknown of stateless liberty and self-organisation.
It’s easier to belong to the subculture than to build the social relationships and trust needed to live without the structures there critiquing. A lot of radical politics gets stuck at this point: defending the identity instead of creating the reality.
From an #OMN perspective, the challenge is not proclaiming freedom, but building the social infrastructure that makes freedom possible.
Been working with #mainstreaming people recently. The experience has been eye-opening, and not in a good way. What strikes me isn’t that they are bad people, most aren’t. The problem is that many seem completely unaware of how badly the culture they inhabit behaves. Gatekeeping is normal. Careerism is normal. Status games are normal. Endless #blocking of ideas, projects, and people that fall outside established comfort zones is normal. Then, they wonder why meaningful change never happens.
The pattern is everywhere. New ideas are treated as threats rather than opportunities. People spend more energy defending positions than solving problems. Institutions become focused on preserving themselves rather than the purpose they were supposedly created for. When challenged, the response is confusion – then #blocking – the behaviour is so deeply embedded that it has become invisible.
This isn’t just a problem of NGOs, public bodies, academia, media organisations, or corporations. It’s a broader cultural issue. The incentives point in the wrong direction as most people choose jobs primarily for income, security, status, and benefits. That’s understandable, we all need to survive. But when entire systems are built around those motivations, contributing to society becomes secondary, something to be mentioned in mission statements rather than lived in practice.
The result, a society full of people managing problems rather than solving them. You can see this in every sector, from the highest levels of management down to the lowest-paid positions. The forms differ, but the logic is the same: don’t rock the boat, protect your position, follow the approved path. This is one reason why grassroots projects struggle, as they are trying to solve problems directly, while mainstream institutions are organised around managing risk, preserving legitimacy, and maintaining existing structures.
From an #OMN perspective, this isn’t only a problem of individual morality, it’s a problem of social systems rewarding the wrong behaviour. The answer is not simply to denounce people, that feeds the cycle, the challenge is to create spaces where different values can actually function:
collaboration over competition
stewardship over careerism
openness over gatekeeping
social usefulness over institutional self-preservation
Some people respond by working less, consuming less, and choosing employers whose purpose is broader than profit. Others build grassroots projects outside the mainstream. But, neither path is easy, both come with costs.
The question is not why change is difficult, it is why we keep organising society around incentives that actively discourage it. With this mess in mind in both tech and activism, if your politics is talking only to people who already agree with you, it’s probably a hobby, not a movement. The #OMN path starts with building bridges between different groups, needs, and cultures, as this is how collective power grows.
We live in an age of #stupidindividualism where everyone broadcasts and few connect, so build bridges, not bubbles. This matters because most people are up shit creek without a paddle, yet keep looking in the same places that got them there. Apathy and laissez-faire “common sense” have become normal. Decades of #neoliberalism taught us to think as isolated individuals rather than communities capable of acting together.
One barrier is that people still don’t see the need to move beyond the #feudalism that shapes much of the tools we need. As a result, huge amounts of energy go into defending existing structures and #blocking alternatives before they have a chance to prove themselves. That’s why the #OGB project approach is simple: build it permissionlessly and let it loose. People will see the value, or they won’t #KISS
The goal isn’t convincing a handful of gatekeepers, the goal is empowering a larger group of people to participate in activism, technology, build consensus, and push the social agenda they actually need of less permission, more practice, less management, more participation.
This is also why so much campaigning, #NGO and alt-tech events can be frustrating. The official conversations are dominated by career paths, institutional interests, branding exercises, and carefully managed narratives. Lots of noise, not always much signal – The useful stuff usually happens elsewhere, in corridors, over coffee. That’s where bridges get built, where ideas get tested and where trust grows. The social layer matters more than the stage.
The #OMN lesson is simple – Technology alone doesn’t solve social problems, we need movements grown by connecting people, governance grown by participation, commons grow by use. If we want a better world and #openweb, we need to spend less time protecting silos and more time building bridges. That’s where the signal still lives.
But when documenting moments and movements like this It’s important to focus on what actually matters not only the normal surface mess.
Watching this video reminded me how much activist history gets distorted by sectarianism. At places like #Greenham, divisions formed around the “colour” of the gates – different ideologies, identities, and political cultures. The trouble is that the loudest and most conflict-driven voices end up telling the history afterwards.
The people saying “look at me” get remembered, while the people saying “don’t look at me, I’m busy, look at the issue” are usually too busy doing the actual work to document it.
This leaves us with a skewed activist memory, where internal drama becomes history and the slow, collective labour that made things happen fades into the background.
It’s not just a problem of the past. We keep reproducing the same mess today.
Let’s focus on being honest, the most exhausting and destructive habit in activist and alternative tech spaces is the blinded reflex to turn disagreement into personal conflict. Someone challenges an idea, and it becomes an attack, names a pattern of behaviour, and suddenly it’s a vendetta. Someone points at structural problems and gets accused of targeting individuals. This is #stupidindividualism in its purest form, and it’s #nothingnew.
It’s not only about difficult personalities or bad intent, it’s the result of forty years of #neoliberal conditioning. The #deathcult of “common sense” market logic has trained us to see everything as personal, personal responsibility, personal success, personal failure, personal conflict. The frameworks for understanding structural problems have been stripped away, so when structural problems are talked about, people fall back on the only tool they’ve been given – finding someone to blame.
The result is nasty and predictable, good projects collapse into personality clashes, needed critiques get dismissed as personal attacks. The real issues will be the systemic mess that needs composting, never get addressed, because everyone is too busy dealing with the drama. This is #deathcult doing what it’s designed to do – keep us fighting each other instead of the system.
So why do we struggle to see this mess, it’s mostly invisible to the people caught inside it as people feel like they’re responding reasonably to real problems, and sometimes they are. But the frame – “this person is the problem” – is almost always wrong as this mess runs like background software, it shapes perception before conscious thought kicks in. A structural critique goes in, a personal accusation comes out – not because people are stupid, but because that’s how they’ve been trained to interpret things.
This is why telling people to “be less defensive” or “think structurally” rarely works. Were asking people to change behaviour without changing the environment that produces it. Culture follows structure, if we want different behaviour, we need different processes, practices, and spaces.
How we actually compost this? It isn’t about perfection, it’s about having better tools – some practical shovels (like the #OMN) to use to name the pattern, not the person, when things start getting personal, we simply shift the frame. “This feels like it’s turning into a personal conflict, but the issue is actually how we’re making decisions” works better than “you’re being defensive.” One opens space, the other closes it.
Build processes before you need them, don’t wait for conflict to figure out how to handle it. Groups that survive disagreement usually have simple, visible processes in place: how decisions happen, how issues get raised, who mediates. This is what #4opens and #OGB are for – use them early.
Separate decision-making from chat as most drama lives in chat spaces – WhatsApp, Discord, comment threads are optimised for reaction, not reflection. If decisions happen there, we’ll get reactive, personalised outcomes. Move important decisions into slower, more visible, documented spaces.
Make structural problems visible as vagueness fuels personalisation – Clear statements like “our funding model creates dependency” or “new people can’t influence decisions” give people something real to work on. Without that clarity, frustration gets directed at individuals.
Actively grow a different culture, its slow, but it works. Model structural thinking by rewarding people who name patterns rather than blame individuals. Create spaces where “this process isn’t working” is normal. Over time, this shifts what feels like common sense.
Let people step back without drama, not everyone can work in structurally-aware, non-hierarchical spaces right now, that’s OK. If leaving a project becomes a crisis, everything becomes personal. Lower the stakes, reduce the pressure, and personalisation drops.
Compost failure publicly, when things go wrong, talk about what failed, not who failed. The #openweb keeps reinventing broken wheels because we don’t compost our mistakes. Honest, structural post-mortems build shared learning.
The deeper work is that none of this is quick. The #deathcult didn’t embed itself over decades by accident, and it won’t disappear because of a few good arguments. People don’t think their way out of (stupid)individualism, they experience their way out.
What works is repetition of building spaces that function differently, showing that collective approaches work and sticking with it long enough for that experience to become normal. That’s the path of #OMN not only focusing on fixing people, not that only the right language solves everything. The path is #KISS, building open, trust-based, structurally honest systems – and composting the failures along the way – we slowly shift what “common sense” looks like.
The work is slow, practical, and unglamorous, the shovel is structure, the compost is honesty. The soil is what grows when we stop treating every problem as someone’s fault. Pick up the shovel, there’s a lot to get through.
The fluffy/spiky tension is one of the oldest and least resolved arguments in activist and grassroots organising spaces. It’s real, it’s necessary, and it’s been exploited. Let’s name the grounding first.
The Fluffy Position
Fluffy politics is about inclusion, emotional safety, consensus, and non-confrontation. At its best it builds welcoming spaces, holds diverse people together, and prevents the macho posturing that drives people away from radical movements. Fluffy people are doing the invisible emotional labour that keeps groups functioning. Without them, most grassroots projects collapse into ego wars.
At its worst, fluffy becomes conflict avoidance dressed as principle. Real problems don’t get named,difficult people don’t get challenged. The group becomes a feelings-management exercise rather than an organising force. Nothing spiky – meaning nothing that actually confronts power – ever gets done, because confrontation itself has been pathologised.
The Spiky Position
Spiky politics embraces confrontation, directness, and a willingness to name uncomfortable truths regardless of who gets upset. At its best it cuts through bullshit, holds people accountable, and actually frightens the powerful rather than merely inconveniencing them. Spiky people often do the work nobody else wants to do – the hard conversation, the direct action, the refusal to pretend things are fine when they aren’t.
At its worst, spiky becomes machismo with a political justification. Aggression gets mistaken for radicalism, burning things down feels more satisfying than building. People who raise concerns about tone or process get dismissed as weak, co-opted, or bourgeois. The movement shrinks to whoever can tolerate the bad atmosphere.
The Debate
The genuine fluffy/spiky debate is worth having. Movements need both tendencies and the tension between them is productive when it’s honest. Fluffy without spiky produces nice shallow groups that change nothing. Spiky without fluffy produces effective alienators who also change little, just more dramatically. The balance is hard and context-dependent – what works on a picket line is different from what works in a community meeting, which is different again from what works online.
The problem is this debate rarely gets had with any honestly, because of a third character type who poisons the the change and challange path.
The Passive-Spiky Fluffy Troll
This is the one that needs naming clearly. This character tends to presents as fluffy. They speak the language of care, inclusion, and safety. They invoke consensus, call for kindness, and position themselves on the moral high ground of the group. But their actual behaviour is spiky in the most destructive possible way – not the honest confrontational spiky that names real problems, but a passive, weaponised spiky that:
Distracts – derails productive conversations with tone policing, and hurt feelings at strategic moments
Decides – makes unilateral calls while performing consultation, using the language of consensus to smuggle through their own blinded preferences
Destroys – systematically undermines people and projects they find threatening, always with plausible deniability, always from behind the shield of their own stated good intentions
They are, in effect, trolls. Not the obvious aggressive troll who can be identified and dealt with, but something more insidious – the troll wearing a fluffy third-bear costume, all warmth on the surface, all disruption underneath.
The Character Types
The Tone Policer – Never engages with substance, always has a concern about how something was said. Uses the language of trauma and safety to shut down challenges to their comfort or control. Allies with whoever seems most aggrieved at any given moment.
The Consensus Hijacker – Performs collective process while actually steering outcomes. Calls meetings, sets agendas, summarises discussions in ways that happen to always reflect their own narrow position. If challenged, expresses deep hurt that their commitment to the group is being questioned.
The Concern Troll – Agrees with the goal in principle, always. Just has concerns. So many concerns. The timing isn’t right, the framing is off, this might alienate people, have we really thought this through. Concern is infinite and self-replenishing, ensuring nothing ever moves forward.
The Moral Credentialist – Collects grievances and allyships like armour. Their identity and stated commitments make them immune to criticism. Any challenge to their behaviour becomes an attack on the community they represent. This is the most effective variant because it recruits others to their defence automatically.
The Exhaustion Engine – Doesn’t block directly, just makes everything take so long, require so much emotional management, and generate so much process overhead that the capable people eventually leave. Wins by attrition.
What To Do
Treat them as trolls. Not with hostility – that plays into their framing – but with the same basic approach you’d use for any bad-faith actor in a shared space:
Don’t feed the performance. Engaging earnestly with endless concern-raising rewards the behaviour.
Name the pattern, not the person. “This keeps happening and it’s blocking us” is more useful than “you are doing this deliberately.”
Keep moving. Don’t let process objections halt action indefinitely. Document, note the objection, proceed.
Protect the genuinely fluffy people. Real fluffy organisers are valuable and they’re often the first casualties of passive-spiky trolling, because they’re the most susceptible to guilt and the most invested in harmony.
The fluffy/spiky debate is needed, but the passive-spiky fluffy troll makes sure it never happens properly. Naming them is the first step to composting the mess they make.
Let’s look back to before the #Fediverse, to be honest about the last two decades of #openweb failure, for a long time we got pulled off the path. Not only by enemies, but by a mix of fear, fashion, and half-understood technical “solutions” that felt right to fearful people at the time.
The rise of the dogmatic, blinded #encryptionist mindset came out of real conditions of mass surveillance revelations (Snowden era), common sense #neoliberal distrust of states and corporations and the real harms of our worship of the (same neoliberal) #deathcult of the #dotcons
Encryption mattered – and still does – private space matters, protection matters. But what happened next at this time is where things went wrong – we shifted focus from necessary tool to blinded totalising path. For the #geekproblem and its fashionista followers – encryption shifted from being a tool in the stack to the answer to everything.
Instead of asking what should be public? – what should be private? And how do we build shared, accountable space? We got a flattened answer of “make everything encrypted and trustless” that sounds good to the blinded fear filled crew as It feels “safe”. But if you are not blind, it obviously undermines the foundations of the #openweb we were working to reboot, the #openweb isn’t built on secrecy – it’s built on shared visibility, trust, and negotiation.
This was mess, enter #blockchain and #DAO – the peak of the detour, this is where the #fashionista layer really took over. Into this already confused path stepped #blockchain, #NFT’s and #DAO governance models of token economies. The mess making was wrapped in smoke and mirrors language of decentralisation, autonomy and trustlessness to “fixing governance”.
But look at what they actually did – financialisation of everything, instead of building commons, we got tokens, ledgers, “market” incentives leading to speculation. This is a very easy to see failed imagination of market logic reintroduced through the back door of wealth = power, not in any way new, it’s smoke and mirrors to hide the same old system the native #openweb path was supposed to move beyond. This detour directly contradicts gift economies, commons-based governance and trust-based collaboration, it was used to push this needed path out of sight.
It’s the normal mess of fear based #stupidindividualism – governance avoidance disguised as governance. DAOs didn’t in any way solve governance, they simply avoided it as real governance is messy, social, contextual, rooted in trust and relationships. DAOs tried and failed to replace this with hard voting mechanisms, token-weighted decisions and rigid rules. That’s not in any way useful governance, that’s automation of power to remove the human layer instead of engaging with it, its pure #geekproblem that our #fashionistas were to blind (or self-interested) to see past.
This is the same problem we are repeating today (still in embryo) with the current new crew taking over pushing the #openweb reboot – this time its not only encryption, but it’s the same mess of shifting focus away from what actually matters, the same distraction.
What can we compost from the last mess, to shine light on this path, back in the day people were busy writing whitepapers, launching tokens, debating protocol layers. Were they should have been building communities, maintaining infrastructure to grow trust networks to support real-world use #KISS This misdirection of focus, resources and energy is the recurring damage as attention is diverted away from the soil layer into tiny self-interested abstract cliques that never root.
The #geekproblem and the #NGO loop feed this mess, as the fashionista class capture does not happen in isolation. It is amplified by two reinforcing dynamics – the #geekproblem – preference for technical certainty over social mess, belief that systems can replace relationships, discomfort with ambiguity and lived complexity. The #NGO layer with its need for fundable, legible “solutions”, preference for clean frameworks – over messy reality, career pathways built on producing narratives, not outcomes.
Put these together, and you get complicated “solutions” that look impressive, but don’t work in practice. Back then we had a decade of drift we need to not repeat now. Back then we ended up with over-engineered systems nobody uses, governance models disconnected from lived communities and fragmented efforts chasing the next “solution”. This weakened focus on building actual alternatives, meanwhile, the #dotcons carried on consolidating power.
The reality check for today is we built a pile of #techshit, and we are doing the same now with the current takeover crew of the #Fediverse. The last time because we failed to compost the accumulated outcome of the mess of abandoned projects, broken promises, conceptual clutter we still have the current confused direction. We need to now compost this historical mess, as keeping pretending this is fine is part of the problem, it’s not fine. But – and this matters – this “shit” doesn’t need to be useless, it’s compost.
The native path we didn’t take (but still can), was always simpler, and still is, to build in public (#4opens), separate public and private space (#KISS), focus on trust, not “trustless”, grow from real communities, not closed cliques.
We need to develop governance as lived practice, not only code, this is what #OMN and #OGB are pointing toward – human networks first, tech as support, not driver, openness as default for shared knowledge, privacy where it actually matters. If we’re serious about a future – it is to stop chasing totalising tech fixes, stop “common sense” financialising community, stop pretending governance can be automated and start growing from the soil up. And most importantly shift from control → collaboration, from abstraction → grounded practice to shift from narrative → lived reality.
The point is the #encryptionist turn wasn’t (only) evil as it was a reaction to real harm. But it became a dead end when it tried to replace the social with the technical. What we need to lean from this to shift the current mess is if we want a real #openweb we don’t need more “solutions”, we need to get our hands dirty again to compost the mess to make soil to plant something much more real that can grow.
So what path should we be focusing on to balance this current oligarchy mess. The #OMN (Open Media Network) is decentralized, grassroots, focused on an “open process” rather than a fixed, top-down control structure, it’s a governance model:
Continuous ecological process, as navigation through lived memory rather than a set of static rules.
Decentralized & community-driven, from users, producers/creators, and admins, aiming to balance out central authority.
Federated coordination, strong transparency were no one has to agree, but reasoning and actions are publicly visible to produce accountability for public mess making.
The #4opens Principles – building on open data, open source, open standards, and open process.
Emergent structure, grows organically through “lived collaboration” and social federated tech flows #OGB (Open Governance Body).
The #OMN is a path to growing an alternative to corporate-controlled platforms (#dotcons), a “public-first” digital commons.
For years, the #fashionista#openweb conversation has been stuck in a loop of naming villains: surveillance capitalism, the #dotcons, Zuckerberg, Musk, “the algorithm.” But focusing on enemies only gets you so far. The creative question isn’t what we’re against – it’s what we’re actually building together to replace it.
That’s where the #OMN takes a useful path. Yes, the big platforms absorb resistance, repackage it, and sell it back to us, that cycle is real. But pointing it out, again and again, doesn’t break it. In fact, it can become part of the same loop – critique as content, outrage as engagement, nothing changing underneath. The issue isn’t just that the #dotcons are powerful. It’s that we keep rebuilding their patterns, even when we think we’re doing something different.
This is why the #OMN isn’t framed as a protest, a brand, or a “better platform.” It’s a collective path to build alternatives that don’t reproduce the same failures. Not through ideology alone, but through structure. The #4opens – open code, open data, open standards, open process – aren’t slogans here, they’re foundations. They’re how we walk paths that can be shared, checked, and reshaped collectively, rather than captured and enclosed.
The same goes for governance, the #OGB isn’t about replacing one centre of power with another, it’s about making sure power doesn’t quietly re-centralise through habit, personality, and convenience. If we don’t actively design for that, we drift straight back into the same patterns, and that drift is the problem.
People don’t arrive in the #openweb as blank slates. We’ve all been shaped by the systems we’re trying to move beyond. The habits of control, gatekeeping, branding, and individual positioning – what we call #stupidindividualism – come with us. If we don’t consciously challenge that, we just recreate the #dotcons in smaller, messier forms.
So the focus has to shift, from only critique to construction, balancing individuals to collectives and from blinded platforms to open processes. That means starting with the human network – trust, collaboration, shared purpose – and letting the technology grow out of that. Not the other way around.
It also means accepting that this work isn’t neat or fast. There’s no clean break, no single “killer app,” no moment where the old control simply disappears. What we have instead is a composting process: breaking down what doesn’t work, reusing what does, and slowly growing something more resilient.
That’s the revolt, not a personal mission, not a branded alternative, but a collective shift in how we build and relate. If we get that right, the #dotcons stop being the centre of the story, not because they were defeated, but because we’ve made them less relevant.
#techchurn is the endless cycle of adopting new platforms, tools, and technologies – not because they solve any real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. It burns community trust, institutional memory, and activist energy, while leaving the underlying #nastyfew power structures untouched. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=techchurn
The #OMN uses #stupidindividualism to describe the culturally manufactured habit of prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective well-being – a behaviour normalised by forty years of #neoliberalism, where people work against their own community and ecological survival while believing they are exercising “freedom”. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=stupidindividualism
In the #OMN hashtag story, #spiky is the confrontational, direct, and uncompromising tendency within radical movements – the willingness to push back against power, name uncomfortable truths, and refuse to sand down political edges for mainstream comfort. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=spiky
#RSS is the unglamorous but democratic backbone of the #openweb – a simple, open standard that allows content to flow without the gatekeeping, algorithmic manipulation, and the data hoarding of the #dotcons.
#postmodernism is the cultural current that dissolved shared truth into competing narratives, undermines the foundations needed for collective action – leaving people fragmented, cynical, and unable to build solidarity. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=postmodern
In the #OMN hashtag story, #PGA (Peoples’ Global Action) represents horizontal, grassroots, anti-capitalist organising – a prefiguration of the #openweb, built on direct action and solidarity rather than #NGO bureaucracy or #mainstreaming compromise. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=PGA
In the #OMN path, #p2p means people-to-people before peer-to-peer – real human relationships and trust as the foundation that decentralised tech should serve, not replace. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=p2p
The #openweb is internet infrastructure built on open standards, open-source code, and community control – where users share power – as opposed to the #dotcons, with the #closedweb which enclose and monetise the commons. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=openweb
In the #OMN path, #open means building on the #4opens – open code, data, standards, and process as a foundation for technology that serves people, not profit. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=open
#OMN (Open Media Network) is a grassroots project to build human-centred, trust-based digital infrastructure on the #openweb, grounded in the #4opens and focused on community control over technology. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OMN
The #OGB (Open Governance Body) is a framework for transparent, inclusive decision-making – replacing hidden power structures with accountable, federated, messy collective governance. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OGB
In the #OMN story, #NGO refers to professionalised activism that defuses radical politics – replacing grassroots power with managed, funder-friendly “dissent”. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=NGO
In the #OMN path, a hashtag is not just a label – it’s a node in a shared political vocabulary, building a map of meaning and direction. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=hashtag
In the #OMN story, #DIY means reclaiming the ability to build and organise outside institutional control – grounding politics in practice. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=DIY
#dotcons are the corporate platforms – Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, YouTube and their kin – whose business model is built on harvesting user data, manufacturing engagement, and converting human attention and community into profit, while presenting themselves as neutral public spaces.
In the #OMN hashtag story, #DIY means reclaiming the practical capacity to build, organise, and maintain tools and communities outside of corporate and state control – not as a lifestyle choice, but as a political act of grounding radical change in real skills, real trust, and real human relationships rather than outsourcing power to institutions that don’t serve you.
The #deathcult is the #OMN metaphor for the self-destructive logic of forty years of #neoliberalism – an ideology so committed to short-term profit, individualism, and economic growth that it knowingly sacrifices the ecological and social foundations that human life depends on.
In the #OMN hashtag story, #compost means taking the failures, mistakes, and accumulated mess of past movements and tech projects – rather than discarding or ignoring them – and breaking them down into something that can feed new growth, treating dysfunction and #blocking dead ends as raw material for building better rather than as waste to be hidden.
In #OMN language, #closedweb refers to the controlled digital infrastructure – platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter – built on proprietary code, extractive business models, and centralised power, where people have no meaningful control over their data, their communities, or the rules that govern them.
The #deathcult of #neoliberalism has driven us past the point where “climate change” – with its implication of manageable, orderly shifts – remains any honest description of what we face now. What we actually have is #climatechaos: cascading, systemic breakdown of the ecosystems, weather patterns, and social structures that human civilisation depends on, accelerating faster than institutions built on forty years of market logic are capable of, or willing to, address.
#classwar is the ongoing and unacknowledged conflict between those who benefit from and actively reproduce the #deathcult of #neoliberalism – the #nastyfew, managing, and credentialed classes – and the communities, workers, and ecosystems they exploit. A conflict that #mainstreaming culture works to render invisible, reframing systemic dispossession as individual failure.
#capitalism is the current common sense – the water we swim in – the economic system that systematically converts collective goods, human relationships, and the natural world into private profit, enforcing this logic through every institution and platform we touch, while presenting itself as the only possible reality.
In the #OMN hashtag story, #block refers to the reflexive, unconscious tendency of individuals and communities to shut down unfamiliar and challenging ideas, people, and processes – a defensive gesture rooted in #stupidindividualism and #postmodernism that prevents the trust-building and messy collective work needed for real #openweb organising.
#blinded refers to being so captured by #mainstreaming tech orthodoxy and ideological “common sense” – particularly #neoliberalism and #dotcons culture – that you no longer see, or refuse to see, the harms those systems cause or any alternative paths that exist outside them.
#fashernista describes a person in progressive or radical spaces who prioritises the appearance and aesthetic of activism – the right look, language, and social positioning – over the unglamorous, difficult work of actually building lasting structural change.
If you want, the next step is to cluster these into a clean “chapter flow” (roots → mess → behaviours → solutions) so this stops being just a glossary and becomes a narrative tool.
These are the foundation tags – the ones everything else grows out of – the overall project: grassroots, trust-based, human-centred media infrastructure
#openweb – the political/technical terrain we’re trying to reclam
#4opens – the non-negotiable baseline (open code, data, standards, process)\openprocess – visible, participatory decision-making as default
#grassroots – bottom-up power, not institutional mediation
This cluster is about legitimacy, if it’s not grounded in these, it drifts into #NGO capture or #dotcons logic quickly. This is the “native soil” everything else either grows from or gets rejected by.
The Problem Space (what we’re composting), these tags describe the mess we’re in – the stuff we don’t ignore, but break down.
#deathcult (neoliberalism as destructive common sense)
#neoliberalism – 40 years of market logic shaping behaviour
#mainstreaming – dilution and co-option of radical ideas
#NGO – managed dissent and professionalised politics
#classwar – underlying structural conflict
This is the compost heap, you don’t fix this directly, you don’t “win” against it head-on. You break it down, reuse what’s useful, and grow alternatives around and through it.
The #geekproblem Layer (tech distortions) is where things go wrong in implementation.
#geekproblem – replacing social trust with technical control
#techchurn – endless pointless rebuilding
#encryptionists – over-prioritising technical purity over social reality
#KISS – counterbalance: keep things simple and usable.
This cluster is why good ideas fail, not because the ideas are wrong, but because the tools and culture get shaped by people who don’t understand social process. This is where most #openweb projects die.
Cultural/Behavioural Patterns (how people act). The human layer – messy, unavoidable, and central.
#stupidindividualism – learned self-interest over collective good
#postmodernism – fragmentation of shared meaning
#fluffy – avoidance of conflict, feel-good paralysis
#spiky – necessary confrontation and edge
#block – reflex rejection of challenge
#blinded – inability to see outside dominant narratives
#fashernista – prioritising appearance over substance
This is the real battlefield, not tech, not policy – behaviour. If you don’t mediate this layer, everything collapses back into dysfunction, no matter how good your structure is.
The Alternative Infrastructure (what we build), are the actual tools and practices that make change possible.
#fediverse – decentralised network as a base layer
#activitypub – the protocol glue
#RSS – simple, open distribution backbone
#p2p – people-to-people first, tech second
#FOSS / #opensource – shared ownership of tools
#opendata – accessible, non-extractive information
These only work if rooted in the first cluster, otherwise they get captured and turned into another layer of the #closedweb.
Governance & Process (how we hold it together). Where most projects fail – or succeed.
#OGB – structured, open governance
#openprocess – again, because it’s that important
#DIY – practical ownership and responsibility
Without this, informal power takes over. You end up with hidden hierarchies, gatekeeping, and eventual burnout. With it, you get messy but functional collective control.
Practice & Direction (how we move).
#reboot – reset and rebuild from working patterns
#indymediaback – learning from past grassroots media
#makinghistory – documenting and owning our narratives
#nothingnew – grounding in historical cycles
This cluster stops you repeating mistakes, without it, every new wave thinks it’s inventing something new and walks straight into the same traps.
Grounding Example Layer
#Oxford – real-world test bed of contradictions
#PGA – historical example of horizontal organising
Without grounding, this all drifts into theory, these are example tags anchoring it in lived practice, where things break, and where they can actually work.
The Meta Layer (how to use this)
#compost – break down failure into growth
This is the key to the whole thing – Don’t try to “fix” the mess. Don’t try to “win” cleanly, you compost:
bad behaviour → learning
failed projects → patterns
conflict → structure
Final point (this matters) is the mistake people make is trying to tidy this into a neat theory, reduce it to messaging, turn it into a fixed ideology. That kills it, this clustering is not about control – it’s about navigation.
The mess stays messy, but now people can walk through it without getting lost.If you don’t cluster this stuff, it turns into a wall of noise. The mess is useful.
In every activist space, grassroots project, every loose collective, you get people who bring mess in the wrong way – sniping, backbiting, constant undermining. Call it ego, trauma, status games, burnout… it doesn’t matter. What matters is, this friction is normal, it’s part of the #mess we can’t avoid. The mistake is thinking we can eliminate it. You can’t, but you can design for it. That’s where the #OMN path is useful: don’t try to “fix the people,” build processes that compost the behaviour instead of letting it rot the group.
In the big picture, what we need to actively compost is that anything that starts as a real idea – community, freedom, or independence – gets picked up, processed, and turned into something hollow. Not just by “the other side,” but by the entire modern media and tech machine. Good ideas go in, slogans come out, you’ve seen it: “freedom” becomes branding, “community” becomes marketing and recently “sovereignty” becomes a funding pitch.
This is the trap, when ideas get flattened into talking points, they stop doing anything real. They become easy to repeat, to weaponise and impossible to build with. And once that happens, it doesn’t matter who started the idea, it’s no longer useful. So the question isn’t only left vs right. It’s how do you keep ideas grounded so they can’t be hijacked and sold back to us?
One answer is structure, the #4opens approach is simple, a way to stop things being quietly twisted behind closed doors. If you can see how something works, it’s harder to fake, if you can take part, it’s harder to capture. The other answer is mess (the good kind), the #OMN hashtag approach doesn’t try to clean everything up into a single strait message. It keeps things local, contextual, rough around the edges. That “mess” is protection, because systems that are too neat, too polished, too uniform… are exactly the ones that get captured, repackaged, and pushed back at you.
In plain terms if an idea can be turned into a neat slogan, it can be taken over. If it stays tied to real people, real places, and real processes, it’s much harder to fake. This is the difference between something you can live with and something that gets sold to you. Call it compost if you like – You break things down, keep what’s real, and grow from that.
As this essay is about the internet, lets look at some of the players, an example – Tactical Tech is a Berlin-based nonprofit that’s been around since the early 2000s, working on tech, activism, media, and education. Their core thing is:
building digital literacy + critical thinking tools
producing toolkits, exhibitions, and guides (like The Glass Room, Data Detox Kit)
working with civil society orgs, journalists, activists, educators
focusing on how tech shapes power, politics, and society
They’re not grassroots infrastructure builders, they’re capacity builders and narrative shapers, working through partnership networks, funding, and “field building” – the classic #NGO patterns.
In #OMN view they sit squarely in what we call the #NGO / #mainstreaming layer of the #openweb story. In that they don’t live in the soil (infrastructure, protocols, messy grassroots tools). They build the interpretation layer (how people think about tech). They push this into narratives + toolkits that travel across institutions. That’s why they’ve lasted 20+ years – they’re adaptable mediators, not rooted projects.
So why dose it feels like “they create mess”? The friction comes from this pattern the balance of abstraction over grounding in that they translate messy realities into frameworks, exhibitions and “kits”. This flatten lived complexity into safer portable concepts – in to language production. They are part of the ecosystem that generates terms like digital literacy, resilience and sovereignty (adjacent space). These become floating signifies – useful for funding and policy, messy in practice.
They collaborate with foundations, governments and large NGOs. So their outputs are shaped to be fundable, presentable and non-threatening enough to circulate. That’s where the “compost” instinct kicks in – because this layer detaches language from practice.
But it’s not just negative, if were honest (and it’s worth being), groups like this do some real things. They’ve help millions engage “critically” with tech issues to make complex problems accessible (privacy, AI, influence systems). They might create bridges between activists, educators, and institutions. So they’re not empty, they’re just not where the roots are.
The real tension, the problem isn’t that they exist, it’s where they sit in the ecology. They are compost producers, but they mistake themselves for gardeners. Or more sharply
They circulate meaning rather than anchor it
They mediate change rather than enact it
They stabilize narratives that should sometimes stay unstable
So yes – they create “mess” …but it’s a different kind of mess than grassroots paths. Grassroots mess = fertile, emergent – #NGO mess = abstracted, packaged, drifting.
Projects like Tactical Tech can be a part of the same ecosystem we need – but they sit one layer up from where change actually happens. Their outputs duse need composting because they generalize lived practice into frameworks, turn struggle into language and then feed that language back into systems which tends to blunt its edges.
The task isn’t only to reject them, it’s to ground what they produce back into lived, messy, trust-based practice – the bit they can’t really do. Once you see this pattern, a lot of the confusion in the #openweb space makes sense.
Most confusion comes from people mixing these layers up, Here are more examples of this thinking and working:
Tactical Tech – Layer: Narrative / NGO Role: Translator of tech → society What they do (in practice) • Turn complex tech issues into stories, exhibitions, toolkits • Shape how civil society talks about tech • Build “awareness” rather than infrastructure
In #OMN terms they produce processable compost input, but often pre-packaged into neat bags. This problem pattern flattens messy reality into clean narratives to encourages passive understanding over active building. So what is there value? Good at onboarding people, opens doors into the conversation. But risk is people stop at understanding instead of doing.
Mozilla Foundation – Layer: Narrative + Funding + Soft Infrastructure Role: Bridge between grassroots + institutions What they do is fund projects to run advocacy campaigns (AI, privacy, etc.) that maintains a symbolic connection to the #openweb. In #OMN terms they gate keep legitimacy to define what is “acceptable open”. This is a problem pattern because of NGO gravity → safe, fundable ideas win, radical edges softened into “trustworthy AI” and “ethical tech”. So what is the value? Real money → keeps projects alive and visibility → amplifies issues. The risk is common sense #mainstreaming capture that shapes agenda toward what institutions tolerate. Makeing only more mess to compost.
Open Society Foundation – Layer: Power / Funding Role: Macro-level agenda shaping What they do is fund civil society globally to influence policy, rights frameworks, governance. In #OMN terms its a part of the liberal wing of the #deathcult. Problem being funding creates dependency, agenda alignment when movements adapt to grant logic. Value is it enables work that wouldn’t exist otherwise to support rights-based infrastructure. The risk is it turns movements into professionalised NGOs and risk-averse actors.
Sovereign Tech Agency – Layer: State / Infrastructure funding Role: Stabiliser of critical open tech What they do is fund maintenance of open-source infrastructure with a focus on “digital sovereignty” In #OMN terms they are trying to support the infrastructure layer by using state-language framing. Its a problem pattern as language like “sovereignty” pulls toward state/control logic and away from commons/trust logic. What is the value? It pays for the essential work to keeps #FOSS tools alive. But it risks reframes the #openweb as national infrastructure instead of shared commons.
NLnet Foundation – Layer: Infrastructure funding (closer to soil) Role: Rare “good compost feeder” What they do is fund small, weird, early-stage open projects with minimal interference. In #OMN terms one of the few funding bodies that, could in theory not over-shape outputs to respect messy innovation. But the are problem pattern of limited scaling and still within funding constraints, Value is they enables actual building and possibly supports non-mainstream ideas. The risk is the normal that they still are pulled into NGO gravity over time.
Electronic Frontier Foundation – Layer: Advocacy / Legal Role: Defensive shield What they do – Legal battles, policy advocacy and civil liberties protection. In #OMN terms they protects space for the #openweb to exist. But the are problem patterns, the focus on defence, not creation that only works inside existing legal frameworks. Value they are absolutely necessary to stops things getting worse. The risk is they doesn’t build alternatives = slowing decline, not transformation.
The pattern, is all these orgs sit above the soil. They translate, fund, shape, defend. But they rarely grow rooted communities of sustaining messy trust networks or live with the consequences. So why dose this create “mess”? it is because language drifts away from practice, Ideas come and go: “digital sovereignty”, “trustworthy AI” or “resilience”. These sound solid, but float free of lived reality, then incentives bend behaviour. Funding → reporting → metrics → simplification is when mess gets cleaned up too early or packaged instead of composted
Here the #geekproblem and #NGO problem merge, you get geeks wanting to tidy systems and #NGOs wanting to tidy narratives. The result is generally bad, over-simplified systems + over-simplified stories. The #OMN position is clear and grounded, we don’t reject these orgs, we place them correctly: Useful → yes, Central → no and ground truth → never.
The simple way to say this (#KISS) These organizations sometimes help explain, fund, and defend the world, but they do not remake it. If we mistake them for the source of change, we end up with only better words and worse reality. They have no real role in the next stage, a practical progression from “mapping the mess” → “building something that can survive it”.
To make anything work we need to stop confusing layers (cognitive clarity) – Before anything technical, the path we walk needs to never treat NGO / funding / advocacy layer as if it is THE system. This is the correction we need, in #OMN terms:
NGOs ≠ infrastructure
funding ≠ governance
narratives ≠ reality
protocols ≠ politics
If we can balance this, the outcome the people trying to “fix the web” by only better policy decks, better ethical frameworks, better terminology (like “digital sovereignty”) to start asking “What is actually being built, and by whom?”
How to do this? we need to build the soil layer first (not apps, not orgs) as this is where most projects fail. The soil layer is trust groups, working collectives, repeated interaction spaces and small-scale publishing + coordination. In #OMN framing #indymediaback style groups, #OGB governance spaces and local + affinity networks. If it doesn’t survive social breakdown, it isn’t infrastructure.
Define “failure as feature” systems, is one of the strongest #OMN ideas. Instead of perfect systems that must not break – We grow systems that fail into human repair. What that means in practice is moderation doesn’t escalate → it returns to people, governance doesn’t lock → it re-opens, conflicts don’t freeze → they surface into trust spaces. The path is breakage need to increase human contact, not reduce it, but this directly counters the platform logic (#dotcons), #NGO sanitisation logic and geek “perfect system” logic.
On this path we need to build mediation layers (not control layers). This is where #OGB thinking fits. Mediation layer ≠ governance authority, is translation between groups, conflict visibility, trust routing and decision recording (not decision ownership). We don’t centralise power – we route attention. This is the difference between bureaucracy (control) and federation (flow).
Define “trust as infrastructure” this is the “missing” technical core. Most systems assume identity, verification and thus control. #OMN flips this to assume partial trust, local trust, evolving trust and broken trust. So native systems must record trust signals (lightweight) to allow contradiction, allow decay and allow repair. Trust is not a certificate, it is a living social flow.
Explicitly resist “narrative capture”. This is where problem orgs like Tactical Tech / Mozilla / OSF become relevant. The patterns to avoid – messy reality emerges, #NGO translates it, funding aligns around translation and original practice disappears. #OMN counter-path is if it can be fully explained in a funding report, it is likely already dying. So we maintain ambiguity, partial documentation and lived process > polished narrative.
Build dual-stack reality (critical stage). This is essential, you always run:
Native stack (real community power)
trust networks
local groups
Fediverse-native tooling
#4opens processes
Interface stack ( individual survival layer)
NGO language when needed
funding language when needed
policy translation when needed
The path is never confuse the interface with the infrastructure. So what are composting failures about? Instead of discarding failed projects, rewriting history and blaming actors, we need to explicitly turn failure into reusable material, compost includes:
broken governance attempts
failed funding models
collapsed communities
conflict histories
Output:
patterns
lessons
reused structures
new trust layers
This is where the “mess is valuable” idea becomes operational.
Anti-capture safeguards – Every healthy #OMN system needs resistance to #NGO capture, funding capture, geek capture and ideological capture. Mechanisms:
lose roles
refuse most permanent authority
keep systems reversible
enforce transparency (#4opens)
limit scale before complexity dominates
The long game is federated commons, at scale, the goal is not a platforms, it is many overlapping, messy, partially connected commons. Not one #Fediverse or one governance model, not one truth layer. But overlapping trust regions, with shared protocols and local autonomy to weak global coupling.
The summary (#KISS version). If you compress all of this:
Stop confusing explanation with infrastructure
Build trust-first “soil systems”
Design failure that returns to people
Keep governance as mediation, not control
Treat trust as a living system
Resist narrative capture
Run dual-stack (native + interface)
Compost failure, don’t hide it
Prevent capture structurally, not morally
Scale as messy federated commons, not platforms
The shift is from “understanding the system” → to “acting in a small part of it without being captured” This means choosing a river, a locality, a topic, or a community and committing to working inside its mess without trying to abstract it into a universal model too early. #OMN path is if it doesn’t exist in a place, it doesn’t exist at all. This is where a lot of NGO / narrative layer work fails – it stays placeless.
Build “thin infrastructure”, the #OMN correction to both NGO thinking and geek thinking is that wrong instinct is to build full systems, design complete governance models, define everything upfront. #OMN instinct is to build the minimum structure that lets humans keep adjusting it together. Thin infrastructure = simple publishing tools, basic coordination spaces, visible decision trails and lightweight identity/trust signals. Nothing heavy, nothing “final”, because heavy systems attract control, thin systems attract use.
Make conflict visible, not resolved. This is where #NGO culture diverges hardest from native systems. NGO pattern is resolveing conflict, smooth disagreement and force consensus narrative. #OMN pattern is surface conflict so it can be worked with socially, why, because in real networks conflict is information, disagreement is structure and tension is direction. The compost is the rot in conflict, buried conflict always returns, festers, later as system failure.
Build “trust scaffolding”, not trust systems. This is subtle but crucial, you cannot design trust, you can only create conditions where trust can form and where it can fail safely. Trust scaffolding includes repeated interaction spaces, low-stakes collaboration, visible contribution histories and reversible decisions with clear exit paths. The path to trust is an emergent behaviour of stable mess, not a product of design. This directly opposes #mainstreaming ideas of identity systems, certification systems and #techbro reputation scoring systems.
We need to explicitly reject “clean governance” as this is where most of well-meaning systems collapse. The trap is people try to build clean voting systems, formal representation and universal rule sets. But in messy reality governance is not clean – it is negotiated, situated, and constantly patched. #OMN path, instead of clean governance, we grow layered responsibility, overlapping legitimacy with temporary authority and visible disagreement. Think of governance as weather, not architecture.
Anti-scale principles is very important as most systems fail because they assume more scale = more success The #OMN flips this with a path of scale should be resisted until coordination proves it is needed. Because scale introduces abstraction, funding dependency, narrative capture, bureaucratic drift. So instead we grow horizontally first, federate slowly and allow divergence to tolerate inconsistency.
Build “failure memory” as infrastructure, its one of the most underused ideas in this whole space. Most ecosystems forget failures, hide conflict history and rewrite past attempts. #OMN path is that failure is the most valuable dataset. So you build public failure logs, conflict histories and abandoned project archives with “why this didn’t work” notes. Not as shame, but as compost, because systems that cannot remember failure are forced to repeat it.
Soil layer (real life)
trust groups lived coordination actual practice
Infrastructure layer
tools protocols servers
Mediation layer
conflict handling coordination routing
Narrative layer
NGOs funding language public explanation
Power layer
states capital platforms
On this working group path no layer is allowed to pretend it is another layer, a core anti-confusion mechanism.
So what is the actual #OMN outcomes, when this all works, you don’t get a platform, a movement or a unified system. You get a living field of partially connected commons that can adapt without central control, yes it looks messy from outside – and that’s correct. Because coherence is not the goal, survivability and humain flourishing is. lets reduce the whole thing to operational clarity – Build small, stay local. Keep systems thin, let conflict stay visible, treat trust as emergent. Avoid clean narratives, resist scale, remember failure. Separate layers to never centralise experimentation into control.
That’s where theory finally has to become dirt-under-the-fingernails practice, where the abstraction has to survive contact with reality. Lets look at some example work flows, different angles of the same living loop.
What a real example #OMN#oxfordboaters river project looks like day-to-day. The river “communerty” is not in anyway an organisation. It’s a persistent coordination low affinity around a real place/problem/ecology (a river in this case). if we had a seed of the tech we need working, daily reality looks like this: Morning layer (signal gathering) when people notice things:
water quality change
planning notices
blocked access points
local council updates
photos from walks
stories from anglers / walkers / residents
This is not formal reporting, It’s messy input that lands in:
Fediverse posts
local group chats
simple shared logs
Mid layer (sensemaking) is when a few people (DIY, not fixed) do:
cluster reports (“this looks like sewage spike again”)
link patterns (“this happened upstream last month”)
No authority – just attention shaping (or focalising).
Action layer (light coordination) is made up of small, reversible actions:
someone emails council
someone visits site
someone talks to landowner
someone checks data source
someone posts explainer thread
Crucially no one needs permission to act, only visibility into what others are doing
Weekly rhythm (social compression) is a loose gathering (online or physical):
“what changed?”
“what patterns are forming?”
“what are we missing?”
“what broke this week?”
Light authority, rather focused on shared memory and process. The river project is not a formal group. It is a shared affinity flow. That’s why it works (when it works) – it stays situated, porous, and continuously re-formed.
Lets look at a second example, how #OGB decision flows actually operate, it is not voting or governance in the institutional sense. It is a routing system for trust, conflict, and attention.
Step 1 – Issue appears, something surfaces
conflict
proposal
blockage
uncertainty
It is posted publicly (default open).
Step 2 – Context attaches, people attach:
experience (“this happened before”)
local knowledge
technical input
historical memory
disagreement
Important – contradiction is allowed and expected
Step 3 – Clustering happens (not authority). Instead of leaders deciding clusters of alignment form naturally, disagreement clusters remain visible and minority views persist. Think weather systems, not committees
Step 4 – Decision emerges as a path, not a vote – a “decision” is a visible “common” path of action with acknowledged alternatives still open. So nothing is deleted, nothing is finalised, nothing is owned
Step 5 – Follow-through is voluntary, but visible. People act based on trust in community, reasoning based on proximity and capacity. And they report back into the same system. The native path is the #OGB doesn’t only decide things – it makes decision pressure visible.
What a Fediverse-native governance loop feels like is where it becomes felt reality rather than structure. It feels like slow public thinking, less meetings, less agendas. More like threads that evolve over days, posts that accumulate context and replies that become infrastructure
Persistent memory in the stream, nothing disappears old decisions are still linkable, conflict history is visible and prior attempts remain accessible. So governance is navigation through lived memory. Weak coordination, strong transparency as no one is forced to agree. But disagreement is visible, reasoning is public and action is observable. This produces accountability without authority to grow temporary gravity centres.
Certain threads or instances become coordination hubs, discussion anchors and action nodes. But they fade naturally – nothing, but memmery is permanent. It feels like thinking in public with other people who sometimes act on what emerges. Not bureaucracy, not formal consensus culture. More like shared situational awareness that occasionally crystallises into action.
OMN / #OGB model is: surface → act → observe → remember → re-surface, it is governance more as continuous ecological process, less a fixed control structure.
Think that is anufe for today, please ask in comments to help finish this.
