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

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

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

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

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

Petty politics and personal grudges: Micro-level sabotage. Let’s be honest, some people would burn the future to win a petty feud. This is the everyday rot of #stupidindividualism, where narrow self-preservation and shallow ego become more important than collective progress.

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

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

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

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

We don’t need another app, another platform, another paper. We need to build trust-based networks, support each other, and get our hands dirty together. A humanistic, future is still possible, if we stop feeding the #deathcult and start feeding the soil.

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

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

Talking about the mess we’re in

We’re living in an age of permanent crisis, there’s no going back to “normal.” Stop waiting for it. Let’s just STOP worshipping the #deathcult as a first step away from this mess. The trap we’re in, neoliberalism, or the #deathcult, isn’t optional. It’s systemic. You don’t get to opt out unless you’re rich enough to buy an island… and even then, it’s a fantasy.

But metaphors have value. #deathcult is a metaphor, yes, and a sharp, useful one. It’s a name for the dominant ideology of the last 40 years: neoliberalism, where markets are sacred, society is optional, and #climatecollapse is just another economic opportunity.

We use hashtags like #deathcult, #fashernista, #climatechaos, #stupidindividualism not to confuse, but to bring dry, academic critique into emotional, accessible terms. They’re #KISS, Keep It Simple, Stupid. They cut through the noise, if you let them.

Want an example? I lived a metaphor, ten years ago, I bought a lifeboat and sailed away. Not into isolation, but into reflection. For the last five years, I’ve lived outside most laws and norms. Not because I think that’s the answer, but because it’s one place to plant seeds for better ones.

But the boat, like the #nastyfews islands, isn’t freedom. It’s a metaphor. A stopgap. A reminder that we can step sideways, temporarily, to prepare for change, but only IF we come back and build together.

Power is always social. There is no “DIY freedom” that doesn’t end in loneliness or failure. You are powerless until you engage with others, to build trust and accountability. This is what the #OMN is about. It’s not individual exit, it’s collective entry.

So, talk in metaphors. Use the hashtags. Share the language. Together, they tell a story. But only if you join in.

No more waiting for heroes.
No more worshipping broken systems.
No more technocratic denial.
It’s time to compost the old world and plant something new.

Theory and Practice in Activism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s build something real. Together.

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

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

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

Examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food for thought, and action.

Metadata and the #OMN Path: Who Controls the Invisible Hand?

Capitalism’s invisible hand has always relied on hidden data. In the digital age, that data is metadata the overlooked, under-the-hood information that tells us who, where, when, how often, and what next. It doesn’t matter what you say or do if someone else controls the context around it. That’s where the power lies. Let’s be clear: the battle for metadata is the battle for the future.

Three Broken Paths

Capitalism: Metadata is hoarded by the #dotcons. Google, Meta, TikTok—they thrive on extracting context from your every click. It’s not about what you say, but what your patterns say about you. They sell this to advertisers, to governments, to anyone with enough cash. Capital controls metadata, metadata controls behaviour, and behaviour keeps the system in place. This is the tech-feudalism of today—soft fascism in algorithmic form.

Chinese Communism: Here, the state doesn’t outsource metadata - it owns it. Surveillance is centralised. Social credit systems reduce people to patterns and can be used to penalise deviation. The state controls metadata, metadata controls capitalism. It’s the digitised return of the command economy.

Liberalism: Wants to privatise metadata to the individual, to revive the mythical free market of rational actors with perfect information. But this is a fantasy—metadata’s power comes from aggregation, and no individual can match corporate or state capacity to hoard it. The liberal path leads to a slightly less abusive cage.

Anarchism and the Commons: A Fourth Way

What does anarchism want? It wants the social conditions for free association. It wants autonomy, not just individual, but community autonomy. The #4opens and the #OMN (Open Media Network) are an explicit political project to create this.

Open data: everyone can see and use.
Open metadata: the tail behind the content, telling you where it came from and how it’s been passed around.
Open process: how decisions are made is visible and changeable.
Open code: tools are modifiable and forkable.

The #OMN doesn’t pretend metadata isn’t powerful, it’s built around that power. But instead of hiding it, it makes that power visible, shared, and accountable. We’re not encrypting metadata into irrelevance. We’re composting it into trust.

Commons vs. the market, capitalism uses metadata to target, extract, and sell. We use metadata to share, trust, and build. The #OMN proposes a radical shift to replace the market with metadata commons. In capitalism, knowledge is hoarded for advantage. In the commons, it is shared for coordination. The market’s “invisible hand” becomes the commons’ visible knowledge, messy, partial, human, but rooted in mutual aid, not profit.

Hard vs. soft power, the #OMN doesn’t rely on cryptographic “hard” security. It builds “soft” trust:

You don’t need perfect encryption, you need networks of relationships that resist capture.
You don’t need top-down control, you need reputation, memory, and care.
It’s not about preventing all bad things, it’s about making good things easier to grow, and bad things harder to scale.

Yes, if the state turns fascist, they’ll try to use metadata against us. But they already do. The #OMN doesn’t pretend to offer perfect protection. What it does offer is a head start in building the infrastructure for resistance, before the rubber truncheons arrive.

This matters, metadata will happen, no matter what you do. You can’t opt out. You can only choose where the power flows:

Capitalists?

States?

Individuals?

Or communities?

We choose the commons.

Not in theory, but in practice. We’re building systems that work today, in browsers, on the streets, and in activist circles. This isn’t just tech. It’s a strategy. It’s a shovel for the compost. It’s a way to make new life from the old system’s rot.

A conversation on #OMN issues around metadata

America was always violent -You likely just have not noticed

The thing most liberals forget is that Americans are a notoriously politically violent bunch. From the Boston Tea Party to armed labour uprisings, from the Black Panthers to white vigilantes, from state crackdowns to citizen riots – the American story has always been soaked in political violence, the “land of the free” has enforced its freedom with fists, guns, and fire.

But over the last 40–50 years, all that was deliberately erased, rewritten, smoothed over, sold back as Disney-branded rebellion or CNN documentary tragedy. Out of sight, out of mind, out of options. That was the bipartisan strategy from Reagan to Clinton, Bush to Obama. Not to resolve pressure, but to suppress it.

The return of reality, is what we’re seeing now, this isn’t some “unprecedented crisis.” It’s a return to form. It’s the American normal that elitists have been desperately trying to keep hidden under plastic for decades. The only thing that’s changed is this: There’s no longer any outlet for the pressure, no trusted media, no real opposition party, no economic ladder, no commons to gather in, just debt, anxiety, and screens.

What now shocks the political class isn’t the chaos, it’s that there’s no release valve except their own collapse. They’re not afraid of the people rising up, They’re afraid that the state will be held accountable, and lose.

We were at this moment before in the USA, when the new deal was a white flag, let’s go back for a moment, FDR’s “New Deal” wasn’t a gift, It was a surrender, after 50 years of exploitation by the robber barons and their cronies, the country was on the brink. Labour revolts, communist organizing, anarchist movements, real threats to the state, were everywhere. FDR was smart enough to see the writing on the wall. The New Deal was a bargain: “Here’s a little back. Don’t take the rest.” It worked, temporarily. But only because people still had leverage.

Now? Every President since has mostly just tried to keep the lid on, offering less and less in return, and weaponizing the “culture war” as a distraction. By the Clinton era, the deal was done.

Deregulate the economy.

Outsource everything.

Privatize everything else.

Turn politics into a spectacle.

Keep the pressure building—but never release it.

And now here we are, in a real mess, with a poisoned society from 40 years of #deathcult worship, the political class are now standing naked before the onrushing #climatechaos and social break down, stripped of their sacred robes.

Spiritual poison: stripped rituals, atomized families, forgotten connections.
Social poison: movements fractured, solidarities lost to infighting.
Civic poison: institutions hollowed out, education turned to obedience training.
Media poison: truth for sale, journalism devalued, platforms turned to weapons.
Cultural poison: every feeling a product, every hope a commodity, every act of care reduced to an app.

This should worry the #nastyfew who are propping up this political class. We, the people, are still numbed, distracted, transactioned, algorithmically isolated, so still we can barely even imagine a world otherwise. And still the pressure builds, the worst mistake they’ve made is believing they can just keep doing this, that there are no consequences, that people will always submit if fed enough Netflix, fentanyl, and Uber Eats.

But history doesn’t work that way, when a government wages war on its people… Eventually, it loses, not because the people are strong, but because the government is brittle. The lie of modern technocratic rule is that you can govern without trust, coerce without violence, suppress without blowback. That myth has shattered now, collapse is a trajectory, not a theory.

So what now? We need to rebuilding beyond collapse. This is where our work comes in. #OMN, #indymediaback, the #openweb they’re not just nice ideas, they’re survival infrastructures. We can’t wait for a revolution that will never be televised or appear in our algorithmic feeds. We can’t expect institutions to reform themselves. We need:

Public spaces without paywalls

Media systems without gatekeepers

Tech that serves people, not platforms

Governance that comes from below, not above

This isn’t just political, it’s existential. Either we rebuild from the rubble of this poisoned world, or we get buried beneath it.

The choice isn’t “radicalism” or “reform.”
It’s resistance or thoughtlessness.
Collapse or commons.

You decide.

The current mainstreaming’s greatest sin is thoughtlessness

The current mainstreaming’s greatest sin is thoughtlessness

Everyone knows we are in a mess, but most people are too distracted to do anything to change the current path. We’ll keep on this path – scrolling, clicking, consuming – because the current mess we live in is incredibly skilled at hiding consequences.

The environmental cost is buried under greenwashing. BP rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum.” Shell sponsors art galleries. Apple makes claims about “carbon-neutral” devices—then glues batteries shut to prevent repair. Meanwhile, rare earth extraction, e-waste, and fast fashion destroy ecosystems from Congo to Cambodia.
The labour cost is outsourced, invisibilized, atomized. Amazon warehouse workers urinate in bottles to keep pace with surveillance timers. Foxconn installs suicide nets around dorms. Uber calls drivers “partners” while avoiding all responsibility for their lives or livelihoods.
The mental health cost is reframed as personal failure. You’re anxious and burnt out? Must be your mindset. Try a mindfulness app. Maybe eat better. Maybe “grind smarter.” Meanwhile, the structure of your life—precarious work, information overload, climate dread, is never questioned.
The social collapse is blamed on the “irresponsible poor” or “divisive politics.” Communities are gutted by austerity, housing is hoarded by speculators, but you’re told it’s your neighbour’s fault—immigrants, the unemployed, the other political tribe. The system throws fuel on every fire, then lectures you on “civility.”

Every crisis becomes your problem, not the system’s. This is because the #deathcult we unconsciously worship doesn’t just produce stuff, it produces numbness, distraction, and above all, thoughtlessness. A never-ending now, stripped of memory and consequence.

And the moment you try to pull back the curtain? There’s a brand, an #NGO ready to sell you “resistance” too. It’s a system designed to make rebellion feel like a clone lifestyle choice.

A t-shirt with a slogan.
A rainbow flag slapped on a weapons manufacturer.
A “climate justice” conference sponsored by Shell.
A new Netflix docuseries about the thing you’ll forget by next week.

#KISS resistance requires more than outrage, we don’t just need better tech or better politics. We need:

Better attention — to what's real and what's propaganda

Slower thinking — against the churn of hot takes and algorithms

Reclaimed time — stolen back from platform metrics and work schedules

Spaces for consequence — where the impacts of our actions (or inactions) are visible, shareable, accountable

That’s why #DIY infrastructure, the commons, and openness, matter. That’s why we reboot the #openweb, with the #4opens, with the #OMN, with peer-to-peer tools, and with each other. And we need to do this before thoughtlessness becomes all we have left in the #mainstreaming mess.

Tech princes and the #deathcult

What should be closed? And what should never be?

A conversation about ideology, sociology, and the #openweb. Let’s start with a basic liberal framework: “Most social interactions should happen in the open. Some personal interactions should remain private.” Seems reasonable, right? That’s the position many of us think we agree on. Yet when we look at how our technology, and by extension, our society, is being built, that balance is totally out of whack. Today, more and more of life is CLOSED:

Closed apps.

Closed data.

Closed social groups.

Closed algorithms.

Closed hardware.

Closed governance.

And on the flip side, the things that should be protected, our intimate conversations, our location, our health data, are often wide open to surveillance capitalism and state control. What the current “common sense” dogma gets wrong? What is missing is the idea that mainstream tech culture, privacy absolutists, and many crypto/anarchist types:

Almost all good social power comes from OPEN.
Most social evils take root in CLOSED spaces.

When people organize together in the open, they create commons, accountability, and momentum. They make movements. When decisions are made behind closed doors, they breed conspiracy, hierarchy, abuse, and alienation.

It’s not just about what is open or closed, it’s about who controls the boundary, and what happens on each side. If we close everything… If we follow the logic of total lockdown, of defaulting to encryption, of mistrust-by-design… then what we’re left with is only the closed. This leads to a brutal truth, the powers that dominate in closed systems are rarely the good ones.
Secrecy benefits the powerful far more than the powerless. Always has.

So when we let the #openweb collapse and treat it as naive, we’re not protecting ourselves. We’re giving up the last space where power might be accountable, where ideas might circulate freely, where we might build something together.

Examples: When openness was lost. Let’s talk about a real-world case of #Diaspora vs. #RSS. 15 years ago, Diaspora emerged with crypto-anarchist hype as the alternative to Facebook. It was secure, decentralized, and… mostly closed. It emphasized encryption and privacy, but lacked network effects, openness, and simple flows of information.

In the same era, we already had #RSS, a beautifully open, decentralized protocol. It powered blogs, podcasts, news aggregators, without permission or centralized control. But the “Young #fashionistas ” of the scene shouted down RSS as old, irrelevant, and too “open.” They wanted to start fresh, with new protocols, new silos, new power. They abandoned the working #openweb to build “secure” ghost towns.

Fast-forward a decade, and now we’re rebuilding in the Fediverse with RSS+ as #ActivityPub. The same functionality. The same ideals, just more code and more complexity. That 10-year gap is the damage caused by the #geekproblem, the failure to build with the past, and for real people.

So what is the #geekproblem? At root, it’s a worldview issue. A failure to think about human beings in real social contexts. Geeks (broadly speaking) assume:

People are adversaries or threats (thus: encrypt everything),
Centralization is evil, but decentralization is always pure (thus: build silos of one),
Social complexity can be reduced to elegant protocols (thus: design first, use later).
But technology isn’t neutral. It reflects ideologies. And if we don’t name those ideologies, they drive the project blindly.

A place to start is to map your ideology, want to understand how you think about openness vs. closedness? Start by reflecting on where you sit ideologically, not in labels, but in instincts. A quick sketch:

Conservatism: Assumes order, tradition, and authority are necessary. Values stability, hierarchy, and often privacy.

Liberalism: Believes in open society, individual freedom, transparency, and market-based solutions.

Anarchism: Rejects imposed authority, promotes mutual aid, horizontal structures, and often radical openness.

None of these are “right,” but understanding where you lean helps clarify why you walk, build or support certain tools. If you’re building tools for the #openweb, these questions matter:

Do you default to closed and secure, or open and messy?

Who do you trust with knowledge—individuals or communities?

Do you believe good things come from control, or emergence?

These are sociological questions, not just technical ones, maybe start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_ideologies. Where do we go from here? Let’s bring this back to the openweb and the projects we’re trying to build, like:

#OMN (Open Media Network)

#MakingHistory

#indymediaback

#Fediverse

#P2P tools (DAT, Nostr, SSB, etc.)

All of these projects struggle with the tension between openness and privacy, between usability and purity, between federation and anarchy. But if we start with clear values, and an honest reflection on the world we want to create, we can avoid the worst traps. Let’s say it plainly:

Not everything should be open. But if we close everything, we lose what’s worth protecting.

Let’s talk: What do you think should be closed? What must be kept open at all costs? What’s your ideological instinct, and how does it shape your view of the #openweb?

Capitalism is a hostage situation -Not an economy

Our current #mainstreaming path of paywalls stacked on paywalls isn’t life, it’s a trap, we need a way out. In our everyday lives, we’ve come to accept the absurd:

You pay to eat food grown on land you don’t own,
Pay to sleep under a roof that someone profits from,
Pay to drink water privatized by corporations,
Pay to breathe, because the air is poisoned by industries that sell you both the problem and the solution.

And if you miss a payment? Game over (inspired by). That’s not a functioning economy, it’s not freedom, it’s a hostage situation, where every basic human need is held behind a transactional barrier, and the meter is always running.

This #deathcult is late capitalism: an endless stack of paywalls enclosing what used to be public, shared, and free. It isn’t just about money, it’s about control, dependency, and isolation. It’s a system that engineers artificial scarcity, so a #nastyfew can profit while the many just try to survive.

But it wasn’t always like this, for most of human history, people lived within commons-based paths, where land was collectively stewarded, food was grown and shared within communities, tools and knowledge were passed down, not patented and governance was often local and participatory.

The last 200 years of “common sense” capitalism is an enclosure of these commons, first the physical ones (land, water, food), and now the digital and social ones (communication, culture, identity). The #openweb, like the open land before it, is being fenced off. Platform by platform. App by app. Cookie banner by paywall.

This enclosure now defines much of our tech infrastructure, every scroll, click, and share is now mediated by profit-driven platforms. Even activism – once vibrant and messy – is being swallowed by slick interfaces and the same throttled feeds. Resistance is filtered, shadowbanned, deboosted, and pushed to monetize. And “our” #NGOs fighting platform power… are doing so on those same platforms.

It’s an absurdity, and worse: it’s a trap. We need alternatives, real ones. We’re not going to “ethics workshop” our way out of this. We need to rebuild the tools of everyday life – economically, digitally, socially – from the grassroots up.

Commons-based systems, let’s turn some “common sense” on it head, instead of private ownership: stewardship. Instead of scarcity: abundance through sharing. This is where projects, like The Open Media Network (#OMN) come in as a practical framework for grassroots media infrastructure:

Built on the #4opens: open data, source, standards, and governance.

Designed to decentralize publishing, and return control to local communities.

Uses both client-server and P2P bridges for accessibility and resilience.

Encourages trust-based networks over extractive platforms.

OMN is not just theory, it’s active code, messy dev, and practical tools for people to tell their own stories, host their own content, and build alternative knowledge systems outside corporate media. These technologies make community hosting the default – not the exception. They reduce reliance on fragile or compromised #dotcons infrastructure. They’re imperfect, but they’re a step out of the enclosure.

The point isn’t just tech, It’s power, capitalism doesn’t just gate resources. It enforces relationships of power. That’s why rebuilding tech without addressing governance, ownership, and access won’t get us far. The #geekproblem is real: tech that nobody can use isn’t liberation, it’s just another dead-end.

The alternative? Keep it #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), prioritize social usability over technical elegance, build bridges, not silos, return to shared ownership and open processes. Capitalism is a hostage situation, but we can walk out the door – if we build the exit together.

You’re not powerless, and this isn’t about purity or escape. It’s about building real infrastructure for real life, so when the capitalist system keeps crumbling (as it will), we’re not left scrambling. We’ll already be living differently.

#OMN #MakingHistory #4opens #openweb #p2p #indymediaback #geekproblem #commons #decentralize #cooperative #foss #degrowth #resilience

UPDATE the seed of this post was from a toot, but can’t find the original to link to due to the #UX of mastodon updating and no functioning search on my instance to find history, sorry, add in comments if you find the original. Updated

Real world tackling the #geekproblem

With rebooting the #openweb we run headfirst into the #geekproblem, a recurring pattern where: Technically brilliant people build powerful tools …but those tools remain socially unusable …or solve only geek problems, not the needs of actual communities. It’s not malice, often it’s idealism, but it creates a dead-end culture of endless prototypes, abandoned standards, and empty tech demos. Meanwhile, the real-world crisis deepens.

The work we need is bridges building, let’s try this ere “P2P news app” built on #dat Hypercore/Hyperswarm is exciting. Yes, it’s similar to Nostr in structure: distributed relays, client-side aggregation, unstoppable flow. But as with Nostr tech isn’t enough. We are social creatures. A usable system needs:

Clear use cases rooted in human relationships – not just tech possibilities.
User-facing front-ends that invite participation, not gate it.
Interoperability with existing protocols (ActivityPub, ATProto, etc.) to avoid siloing.
Bridges between architectures – e.g. client-server ↔ P2P – so that real-world adoption is gradual and survivable.

The good news, the wider #OMN project is already a sane path forward, with a #KISS hybrid path. The plan is in bridging #P2P and client-server as a way out of this. Something like:

A lightweight server bridge that serves data to client-server users (ActivityPub, fediverse, legacy web),

While simultaneously feeding a P2P mesh, with each peer storing and distributing redundant objects,

So that over time, client-server becomes the bootstrapping layer, and #P2P becomes the long-term archive + resistance layer.

“Data is just object flows – how the user gets the object is irrelevant technically.”

This is the kind of thinking that gets us out of the traps, by moving from protocols to people. This isn’t just about code, it’s about culture. The #geekproblem won’t be solved by more architecture diagrams, it needs movements that embrace imperfection and prioritizes social use, visible, working front-ends people can contribute to and understand, documentation and tooling that builds capacity in others, not silos around the brilliant few.

What next? For the devs:

Can the p2p-news-app codebase be modularized to plug into #OMN projects as a data backend, even in a basic way?

Can we bridge shared data objects across protocols (e.g. post metadata flows from P2P → ActivityPub), even if janky at first?

Can we prototype a simple but cross protocol usable frontend, the examples is the work on #makeinghistory and #indymediaback, that lets non-geeks see and touch the network they’re part of?

Yes, for the movement, keep things messy but moving. Avoid dead ends by always asking:

"How does this empower non-technical users to organize, document, and publish together?"

Keep the tech grounded in the social fabric, the activists, journalists, organisers, and rebels this is all meant to serve. If you’re reading this and thinking, “I can help,” please step forward. There’s space in wider tech/social #OMN and #MakingHistory for everyone, coders, writers, designers, testers and storytellers.

Let’s build bridges, not silos, let’s build tools people can use, not just tools geeks can admire, let’s do this together.

First step: Stop being a prat

We have strong passive #blocking forces stopping the real change and challenge we need before we have any hope of changing the world, thus we as a community have to change our stance towards this blocking. And the first step – the most important one – is painfully simple: Stop being a prat.

That means:

Stop pretending you don’t understand the stakes.
Stop making perfect the enemy of good.
Stop whining about how broken things are while refusing to touch the tools that exist.
Stop treating radical, working alternatives like they’re someone else’s hobby project.
Stop waiting for someone else to do it.

You don’t need a degree in political science or coding, or anything to see what’s happening, from floods and fascists to boat evictions and mass precarity. You don’t need permission from a foundation or a blue tick to take part, you don’t need a five-year strategy. Simple, you just need to stop being a prat, and start doing, so, what does “not being a prat” look like?

Instead of doomscrolling, publish one thing that matters using #OMN tools or paths.
Instead of performative politics, help document what’s actually happening around you in a #4opens way.
Instead of building personal brands, build open #Fediverse infrastructure that your community can use.
Instead of hiding behind cynicism, show up and collaborate – messily, imperfectly is fine, just try not to be a prat.

Why it matters, because the #nastyfew people seizing power right now, from JD Vance to the canal eviction bureaucrats, aren’t being prats. They’re serious about building institutions to shape futures. The tragedy is that our side, the ones with the heart, the vision, the history, are too often busy being clever, passive, cool, and precious, kinda like prats….

The first revolutionary act in the 2020s isn’t heroic, it’s just showing up, not being a prat, and doing the obvious things, together. This is simple, most importantly #KISS please don’t be a prat about this, thanks.

The #mainstreaming is talking about the #deathcult – So why are you still waiting?

The #mainstreaming is talking about the #deathcult – So why are you still waiting?

It took four decades of sleepwalking through #neoliberalism, cultural decay, ecological collapse, and social atomisation, but at last, the #mainstreaming is starting to talk about the #deathcult we’ve been worshipping.

Case in point: Steve Coogan – yes, Alan Partridge – is now publicly accusing Keir Starmer and Labour of “paving the way for Reform UK,” the rising hard-right threat. Here’s the article. It’s not satire, it’s despair. Coogan’s right, and a few years ago, such a comment from a mainstream celebrity would’ve seemed extreme. Today? It’s just stating the obvious.

The “centre” has collapsed. The “left” has hollowed itself out in fear. And the space where #lifecult politics might live is now overrun with fear, cynicism, and opportunism. This is the #deathcult in action, the system that tells you there is no alternative while everything burns down around you. For 40 years we’ve been taught to accept decay as progress, control as freedom, and despair as maturity.

But here’s the thing, we told you so, for people like me, and many others working on open networks, digital commons, grassroots media, and post-capitalist systems, this isn’t news. We’ve been working and talking about this for decades.

In the world I am in, we’ve already working on alternatives: Decentralised governance via the #OGB. Federated publishing through the #OMN. Ethical tech rooted in the #4opens. And a cultural path that doesn’t rely on selling your soul to #dotcons or begging #NGOs for scraps.

We weren’t trying to be ahead of the curve. We were trying to get people to notice the damn cliff. Now that we’re tumbling over it, suddenly everyone’s surprised. Now the #mainstreaming, which ridiculed or ignored these grassroots, native paths, is whispering our language, but still to often refuses to take the paths we are on.

On this continuing common sense #blocking, let’s be blunt – now is the time to stop being prats about this necessary change. No more waiting for the next electoral saviour. No more hiding behind polite inaction. No more pretending that rebranded centrism is going to save us from fascism, it won’t.

If you're reading this, you probably already know the centre won't hold. So what's stopping you?

We don’t need more think pieces, what we need is more people to get their hands dirty, pick up the tools we’ve been building, and start doing the real work. This means, in my area of tech activism:

Federating your networks.
Hosting your own content.
Engaging in horizontal governance.
Publishing with principles.
Building trust and commons, not brands and silos.

The good news? The framework paths exist, the seed communities exist, the infrastructure, with the #Fediverse is small but growing solid. What’s been lacking is you, your time, your courage, your refusal to keep being a prat, to become brave enough to take this different path.

This Isn’t about nostalgia – It’s about now. We’re not dreaming of the past, we’re recovering futures that were lost when the #dotcons, the NGOs, and the #neoliberals buried the #opwnweb’s radical possibilities under a mountain of grift and branding. This isn’t utopianism. it’s simple pragmatism, resilience. It’s how we survive the rise of the new right without defaulting into the arms of the old centre – the ones who made this mess in the first place.

And for the record, if you need reminding: In this tech path, we don’t need another “platform.” We don’t need another fake “community” run by venture capital. We don’t need more loud voices doing nothing. What we need is to take paths back to rooted, open, and federated ways of working.

This is what the #OMN and #4opens have always been about. You can ignore it for another year or two, but you won’t outrun what’s coming, better to start planting now – it’s not too late to grow something real.

The time is now, if you’re waiting for permission, this is it. The people who once called us cranks are now writing op-eds about the collapse we have seen coming for years. The centre is falling, the right is mobilising, the old paths are dead ends.

The future will be built by those who show up now.

We need you, not in six months, not after the next election, now. Stop being a prat, pick up the tools to help build the next world – before the current one burns it all down.

First step: Stop being a prat