This summer #climatechaos

This summer, heat, fires, the soon to come winter floods and insurance withdrawals will make #climatechaos harder to treat as something happening somewhere else. For years, climate breakdown was framed as an activist issue, something discussed by environmental groups while mainstream politics carried on with business as usual. That is changing, people are experiencing the consequences: extreme heat, flooding, damaged homes, rising insurance costs, failing infrastructure and growing uncertainty about what the next few years will look like. The #climatecrisis is moving into everyday life, so how do we live through what is already locked in?

Once the consequences of a warmer world are being experienced everywhere, adaptation becomes an unavoidable path. That means practical changes will finally start to happen such as resilient building standards, flood planning, water management, food systems, energy resilience, heat protection and changes to where and how we build.

But there is a danger in treating adaptation as purely a technical problem, we might redesign buildings, strengthen flood defences, change planning regulations. We can develop better warning systems – but who controls these systems? Who decides what gets protected? Who gets information when something goes wrong? Who maintains the infrastructure? Who remembers what happened last time? And who gets left behind? These are social and political questions.

The missing infrastructure is where the #OMN native path becomes important. Surviving #climatechaos isn’t only about physical infrastructure, it is also about information infrastructure and community infrastructure. During crisis, people need reliable information to know what is happening locally, they need to know who needs help, to know which transport links are closed, where resources are available, what services are operating and what communities are doing. They need ways to communicate when normal paths fail.

And afterwards, they need a record of what happened, this is why the #openweb matters, a resilient society cannot depend entirely on #closedweb privately owned platforms whose responsibility is to the current #nastyfew shareholders and advertisers. It is basic that the #dotcons are not resilience infrastructure – Facebook, Google, X, TikTok and the other #dotcons distribute information, and misinformation very quickly, but speed isn’t the same thing as resilience.

These current #closedweb digital systems are designed around control, engagement, advertising, data extraction and platform addiction. They are dangerous to use when important information will disappear into algorithmic feeds. It should be becoming obverse that communities cannot keep being dependent on proprietary services, as accounts can be suspended, interfaces can change, companies can change their business models, services will disappear.

And the information itself is often difficult to preserve, connect or reuse outside these #closedweb platforms. That is a terrible foundation for a society increasingly dealing with environmental disruption. This is why the #OMN focuses on the #deathcult story, in part to highlight it isn’t simply a collection of bad corporations. The current mess is about the way of organising society around short-term extraction, profit before resilience, growth before sustainability, competition before cooperation. Private ownership comes before the commons, and immediate financial returns are prioritised over the ability of communities to survive any long-term disruption.

In this mess, climate adaptation within this risks becoming another market, those who can afford resilience buy it, those who can’t are left exposed. Insurance withdraws from risky areas, property values become tied to climate risk. Private companies decide which infrastructure is commercially viable, the result is adaptation as another form of inequality.

To compost this mess we need #KISS social adaptation too – The alternative isn’t to reject technology – It is to change what technology is for. The #4opens provide a useful starting point: Open Data – Open Source – Open Standards – Open Process. These principles make it easier for communities to share information, build on each other’s work and maintain infrastructure without being locked into one corporation. The #openweb gives us the technical culture for this, #Federation allows different communities to remain independent while still communicating. Open standards allow systems to interoperate. Open data allows information to remain useful beyond one platform. And open process allows communities to understand and participate in decisions affecting them.

There is another important piece: memory, when a flood happens, people document it. When a heatwave hits, people record what happened, when infrastructure fails, somebody usually knows why. But much of this grassroots knowledge disappears into #dotcons social-media feeds. A few years later, we start again from scratch. This is why #openweb projects such as #MakingHistory matter. We need living community archives that connect events, places, people, media and responses over time. The archive becomes part of resilience, knowing what happened last time helps communities prepare for the next time.

Moving beyond the current #NGO pointlessness – we need to grow projects like the OMN as shovels, to clear the #techshit mess to grow grassroots infrastructure for publishing, sharing, moderating and preserving information. But yes, the technology is only part of it, the deeper goal is to help communities build trusted information networks that are not dependent on the current #dotcons. A resilient media system should allow people to – publish locally – discover relevant information –
share between communities – moderate collectively – preserve important records – correct mistakes – maintain metadata – and keep historical context. This becomes especially important when normal systems are under pressure as the #mainstreaming is only seeing half the problem. But yes, the mainstream conversation is beginning to understand climate adaptation matters, but adaptation cannot be reduced to flood barriers, new building codes or air-conditioning.

We also need to ask whether the social systems surrounding those technologies are resilient. Can communities cooperate? Can people trust the information they receive? Can knowledge move between organisations? Can local experience become shared knowledge? Can communities govern their own infrastructure? Can we preserve memory? These questions are still largely outside the mainstream climate conversation. They shouldn’t be, the next wave of #climatechaos will test not only our physical infrastructure but our social infrastructure. The challenge is therefore twofold – build the physical systems that help us survive the changing climate – build the open, collective information systems that help communities understand and organise that survival.

The first is increasingly #mainstreaming, the second is where the #openweb, #4opens, #OMN, #OGB and #MakingHistory have something important to contribute. We do need #KISS more resilient communities, and resilient communities need infrastructure they can actually trust and control.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #MakingHistory #OGB #IndymediaBack #climatechaos #deathcult #dotcons #resilience

Grassroots #openweb infrastructure is need for a different future

For 50 years we have worshipped the #deathcult – endless growth, extraction, competition and individualism – and now we are living with the damage that this has done to our society and the living world.

The current hard shift to the right won’t fix any of this, it simply empowers the #nastyfew to surf the apocalypse while more and more of us are left fighting over the scraps.

Blind hatred and political ignorance are not solutions. Neither is pretending that the past 50 years of “common sense” somehow didn’t happen.

So what do we do? We compost the mess, we take the broken assumptions, failed systems, #techshit, tribalism and accumulated political baggage and turn them into something useful.

Apathy is boring, get on with doing something useful please. That’s part of what #OMN is, not a shiny platform, nor another ideological club. It’s made as a shovel for digging through the mess and help build the grassroots #openweb infrastructure we need for a different future.

#4opens #IndymediaBack #OGB #MakingHistory #openweb #deathcult #compost

Feelings/facts, stupidindividualism is about peoples role in systems

Just because you feel attacked doesn’t mean someone is attacking you, sometimes that feeling is worth listening to, it may be telling you that something doesn’t fit with how you currently see the world. But a feeling is not a fact, this matters because much political discussion now begins and ends with personal reactions rather than examining the underlying structures.

Take the hashtag #stupidindividualism. Many people read it as, “You’re stupid because you’re an individual.” That isn’t what it means, the intended meaning is: The form of individualism promoted under capitalism makes us think and act in ways that become self-defeating.

The criticism is not of individuality, individuality is valuable. The criticism is of an ideology that teaches us to see every problem as personal and every solution as individual, even when the problems are obviously social, economic or ecological. This is what we mean by #stupidindividualism.

When every issue becomes “my opinion”, “my identity”, “my choice”, or “my feed”, we lose the ability to understand systems. We stop asking how institutions, technology, economics and culture shape our lives together. That isn’t stupidity as an individual trait, it’s a social condition.

The same misunderstanding appears whenever we talk about #mainstreaming or the #deathcult. When we say #mainstreaming thinking has become “insane”, I’m not saying that individual people are crazy. I’m saying that forty years of neoliberal common sense has normalised behaviours that are collectively destructive.

Endless economic growth on a finite planet, treating community as a market, replacing trust with metrics, replacing politics with branding and replacing human judgement with algorithms. These ideas have become “common sense”, yet they are driving us deeper into #climatechaos and reinforcing the #geekproblem, where technical fixes are repeatedly offered for problems that are fundamentally social.

The same pattern appears across the #Fediverse. Most people are acting in good faith, but many default to familiar #FOSS assumptions without asking deeper political questions. Most newcomers have little knowledge of the history of the #openweb, making it easier for corporate interests, NGOs and well-meaning developers to reshape the space according to the assumptions of the wider #closedweb.

Without governance that fits the culture (#OGB), fragmentation is inevitable. Without trust, federation becomes increasingly fragile – without memory, every generation repeats the same mistakes. Rebooting the #openweb isn’t primarily a technical challenge, it’s a social one. The first step is recognising that not every uncomfortable idea is a personal attack, sometimes discomfort is simply the beginning of thinking.

Breaking the circle of #stupidindividualism

The #Deathcult is a historical metaphor

History shows that societies can normalize destructive ideas until they become “common sense.” The tragedy of the Irish Famine illustrates how blinded dogmatic thinking becomes more powerful than human need. Food existed, yet the prevailing political economy treated markets, property rights, and profit as more important than preventing mass suffering. The disaster was not simply natural; it was shaped by human choices and by the values those choices expressed.

Today we face a different crisis, but one driven by the same logic. The #deathcult metaphor tells us that the right to extract, pollute, and profit need to be better balanced with the right of communities to defend the ecosystems they depend on. This isn’t currently in any real balance. Over the last forty years we’ve shifted the political centre so far toward markets and private accumulation that environmental destruction is treated as normal, while protecting the commons is portrayed as extreme.

If we continue to use our current “common sense” to “balance” destruction against survival, destruction wins. Climate breakdown isn’t negotiated with, ecosystems don’t compromise, physics doesn’t vote. The task is therefore not to seek a mythical middle ground, but to move the social balance back towards the real commons, cooperation, stewardship, and long-term thinking. Only by changing what society sees as “common sense” do we have any realistic hope of avoiding deeper ecological and social collapse.

This is where the #OMN comes in, the #OMN is not simply another technology project. It is an attempt to shift power away from the #dotcons and away from the #geekproblem that has dominated so much of the #openweb. Instead of platforms extracting value from people, or technical elitists deciding what everyone else needs, the path is to place power back in the hands of the people who actually create culture, knowledge, and media.

The #4opens provide the practical framework: open data, open source, open standards, and open process. Together they create the conditions for shared ownership, transparency, and trust rather than enclosure and extraction.

The #OGB complements this by providing grassroots governance. Rather than relying on central authorities or corporate gatekeepers, it explores ways communities can make decisions together while remaining federated and autonomous.

None of this guarantees good outcomes, technology never does. What these projects do is create the possibility for healthier social relationships. They build commons infrastructure instead of proprietary platforms, they distribute power instead of concentrating it, they make cooperation easier than enclosure. As the future is not determined by technology alone, it is determined by the values embedded in the systems we build and the communities that choose to use them.

That’s why the real struggle isn’t simply over software, t’s over the values that software embodies. #KISS reminds us to keep these solutions simple enough for ordinary people to understand, use, and shape themselves. Without that, the commons will once again be enclosed by experts, corporations, or bureaucracies, and we will repeat catastrophes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) in todays rush towards #climatechaos.

The choice is ours. The tools matter because they shape the possibilities. What we build with them remains a collective responsibility.

The mess, the Commons, and the Paths Out of Mess

#OMN #4opens #OGB #openweb #FOSS

This was my thinking on the Fediverse a few years ago – building commons

The #Fediverse is an accidental reboot of the #openweb, it wasn’t designed from the top down, it emerged because thousands of people built alternatives to the #dotcons. That’s its greatest strength, it’s also why it’s so messy.

Herding cats – the #Fediverse has no central authority, every project, server, and community has its own priorities, culture, and governance. It’s often like herding cats. This can be frustrating, but it’s also what makes the network resilient. There is no single point of failure, no CEO to sell it, and no corporation that can simply shut it down. The challenge this leave us with is not eliminating the mess, but learning how to live with it productively.

The invisible problem that keeps blocking this path is in part the limits of “common sense”, what the #geekproblem refuses to see is that the difficulty isn’t primarily technical. For over forty years, #neoliberalism and #postmodernism have shaped what people experience as “common sense.” Competition replaces cooperation. Individualism replaces commons. Endless critique replaces collective construction. People absorb these assumptions without realising it, then push them over real alt paths.

When alternative ways of organising are introduced, many people instinctively react with hostility or retreat. Push too hard, and they disappear back into familiar habits, like snails retreating into their shells. This isn’t usually bad faith, it’s learned behaviour.

We have a project to mediate this mess, native governance without hierarchy. This is where the Open Governance Body (#OGB) comes in. The goal isn’t to control the #Fediverse or impose bureaucracy, the goal is to create lightweight, transparent ways for communities to coordinate, resolve conflict, share responsibility, and make decisions together.

Governance should emerge from the grassroots, not be imposed from above. That’s why #OGB builds on the principles of the #4opens:

Open Data
Open Source
Open Standards
Open Process

The last of these – Open Process – is the missing piece. Technical openness alone isn’t enough. Communities also need visible, participatory ways of building trust. What matters is creating processes that turn #mainstreaming failures into shared learning instead of endless conflict.

The future of the #openweb won’t be built by perfect software, it’s built by imperfect people who learn how to cooperate despite their differences. That’s the real work of #OMN and #OGB: not replacing the mess, but giving it enough structure to grow into a healthy commons.

#Fediverse #4opens #KISS #DIY #openweb

The commons and the problem of power

“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.”

Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall

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.

#OMN #4opens #openweb #commons #fediverse #OGB #indymediaback #climatechaos #deathcult #KISS

Climate Chaos, the reality, heat, collapse, and denial

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:

the #deathcult logic of endless growth
the capture of institutions
the failure of mainstream politics to respond
the systemic nature of climate breakdown

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:

commons over enclosure
cooperation over competition
open systems over closed platforms
shared infrastructure over extraction
long-term memory over constant reset

Q&A

Why use #climatechaos when #ClimateChange already exists? Because language is not neutral.

“Climate change” sounds manageable, a technical adjustment.

“Climate chaos” describes lived instability, cascading breakdown, and systemic disruption.

Use both:

#ClimateChange for reach
#climatechaos for reality, and action

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.

#OMN #climate #4opens #openweb #deathcult #fediverse #KISS #OGB #climatechange

Technology is never just a tool

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.

#OMN #OGB #4opens #openweb #FOSS #indymediaback

The tools we need to compost the #deathcult

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?

#KISS

When Technologists Forget the Warning

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.

Rethinking Grassroots Tech Funding

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.

Build it permissionlessly and let it loose

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.