Tag: OMN

Turning stress, conflict, and exhaustion into commons culture instead of mutual destruction

“To put some “commons” structure into this kindness… A path before we knee-jerk criticise members of the community we should make real offers to help repeatedly (x3) in a positive community way. Only then let the “negative” monster of judgment lose to clean up the mess. Focus on clean up first, the “common senses” desire to attack second. What do you think about growing our positive norms (common sense).”

This is the hard bit of any grassroots movement of turning stress, conflict, and exhaustion into actual commons culture instead of mutual destruction. The #openweb and the #oxfordboaters struggle are not separate things, they are the same social problem playing out in different spaces.

What kills communities is rarely only outside pressure. Most often, communities collapse because fear, exhaustion, and insecurity get turned inward. People stop seeing each other as comrades surviving a mess together and start judging each other as obstacles, annoyances, or moral failures.

That path always ends the same way, more, silence, resentment, burnout, fragmentation, and finally removal by outside power. If we don’t make the effort to really/affectively care the mainstream system does not need to crush fragmented communities, it just waits for them to exhaust themselves.

So it should be obverse to us that we need to consciously grow a different “common sense”, a simple common’s principles. An example that lead to this post – Before criticism, make real offers of help. Repeatedly. Publicly. Patiently. Say “Can we help?”, “Can we clean this together?”, “Can we support this person?”, “Can we solve the practical issue first?” Do this once, then again, then again. Only after repeated good-faith attempts fail do we move to much harder, but needed, conversations about responsibility and boundaries.

That flips the current social norm on its head as right now, many people instinctively jump first to blame, moral judgment, public criticism, personal conflict, and social positioning. Which only goes to make more mess with defensive reactions, gossip, claques, leading to more bad feelings and more mess to compost. The original problem becomes secondary to the social fallout, it is the same destructive pattern we see constantly on the #closedweb of people performing morality instead of building trust.

The irony is that many people involved genuinely care. The problem is the social structure they are acting inside. Without commons culture, care easily mutates into aggression under stress. And the stress is real, boat communities are under pressure:

  • housing pressure,
  • enforcement pressure,
  • media pressure,
  • financial pressure,
  • environmental pressure,
  • and constant uncertainty.

Under those conditions, fear spreads quickly, fear then sharpens into suspicion, suspicion turns personal. Then people who are already vulnerable get isolated and targeted. This is why community structure matters. And yes, people HATE talking about structure. Because structure sounds formal, controlling, bureaucratic, or “political”. But avoiding structure does not create freedom, it creates invisible power, unspoken hierarchies, emotional manipulation, and endless circular conflict.

#KISS applies here, keep it simple, by helping first, focus on solutions before judgment, clean up mess before assigning blame, defend community before performing outrage. That does not mean “anything goes”. Commons culture still needs boundaries. But boundaries work far better when they emerge from visible care and collective trust rather than instant punishment culture.

The really uncomfortable truth is in struggling movements, powerless people can sometimes become dangerous to the very people trying to help them. Not because they are evil, but because abandonment, stress, and insecurity distort behaviour. People lash out sideways when they have no power upwards. This is common across activist scenes, precarious housing struggles, and grassroots communities.

Meanwhile, institutions simply wait, then, when the land becomes valuable enough or politically convenient enough, they sweep everyone away. This is exactly why commons defence matters. If we are serious about defending moorings, boat culture, and free community space, then we need social solidarity strong enough to survive internal conflict without collapsing into backstabbing and fragmentation.

That means both “fluffy” and “spiky” people matter, the fluffy crew mediate, support, de-escalate, organise care and hold social trust together. The spiky crew hold boundaries, confront institutions, resist manipulation, refuse displacement to defend space when pressure grows. Without fluffy people, movements become cruel, without spiky people, movements get crushed. We need both, and despite all the mess, there are positive signs.

The growing “shiny summer” feeling among boaters matters. Community meals, litter picks, conversations, mutual support, visible presence on the river – these things are not trivial. They build legitimacy, morale, and collective identity.

That social light is important because a media dark shadow is coming, as pressure increases, traditional media narratives will frame boaters as irresponsible, antisocial, dirty, chaotic, or obstacles to “proper management”. We need to pre-counter that now through visible commons culture: care for the river, care for each other, visible participation, practical action, and stories rooted in lived history. Because this struggle is not new.

The canal system survived before because communities fought for it. The history matters. Books like Narrow Boat and struggles like Battle of Stourbridge remind us that preservation only happened because ordinary people organised collectively and refused to let living waterways be erased. This is the path again now, messy, human, imperfect, but still possible. If we can grow a new “common sense” rooted in mutual aid, patience, practical care, trust and collective defence, then free boating communities might still exist here in ten years.

Hard fight ahead, but people before us already showed that these waterways and our #openweb culture are worth defending.

#Horizontalism is a buzz word, but let’s look at it anyway as it’s the start and the end of this story, a form of social organization based on the #DIY non-hierarchical, democratic path where power is distributed among participants rather than concentrated in leaders. With a working focuses on “prefigurative politics,” to live and act in the present according to the values of the future society you want to create (e.g., equality, mutual aid, and self-management). Think of a honeycomb or network rather than a pyramid:

  • Assemblies & consensus, were decision-making happens through assemblies to create affinity groups that reach working practical consensus (rather than majority voting), aiming to ensure all voices are heard.
  • Affective politics is about building relationships based on dignity, trust, and mutual respect rather than mere efficiency.
  • Direct action & autonomy has a long history, movements, create their own spaces and services (like food and medical care). The “Fluffy” (Constructive) aspects.
  • Empowerment breaks down the “leader/follower” divide, encouraging everyone to be an active agent of change.
  • Adaptability, because it is decentralized, it can be resilient and difficult for authority to “headhunt” leaders to stop it. The “Spiky” (Messy/Challenging)

    Let’s look at the problems and inefficiencies:
  • Decision-making by only consensus is very slow and time-consuming, thus the rapid shift to #4open affinity groups to balance this.
  • Hidden power dynamics is its real problem that sometimes the lack of structure leads to informal hierarchies, where those with more time or charisma dominate, despite the lack of official titles. We have to solve this by sharing responsibility.
  • Scalability – while great for small, local groups, scaling this path to large, nationwide, or international movements create coordination issues that we need working federated tech projects like the #OMN for.
  • Sustainability, maintaining the energy required for horizontal assembly, especially when faced with external opposition, can be difficult. But without this path of #Horizontalism as a necessary “corrective” to traditional vertical politics, we don’t and up in any participatory spaces at all.

So on a positive sense it’s an easy – but strongly anti-common sense path – to start the real composting we need. On a negative sense its mess and more mess to wade through, alongside the mainstreaming mess flooding in… it’s all mess might as well get used to this 😉

Treating everything as personal conflict is a dead end

People ask why the articles are hard to follow without background, it’s a fair point

People ask why the articles are hard to follow without background, it’s a fair point, but a distraction as these are not stand-alone hot takes, they are all a part of a long flowing story about how we got into this mess and how we might get out of it.

So, focus, please share this and the other posts if we’re going to recover focus and direction on the #openweb path. What happened over the last ten years on the Fediverse wasn’t random. It was a slow drift away from the native path that worked, and toward a confused mess of branding, #NGO careerism, platform thinking, and endless social noise.

What happened over the last ten years on our Fediverse path

The problem is most people now arrive in the #Fediverse with no memory of the culture that built the #openweb of trust networks, grassroots publishing, the messy but functional commons, the #4opens, the idea that media belongs in public and the understanding that social process matters more than shiny tech.

Instead, people arrive carrying the assumptions of the #dotcons – branding over community, engagement overtrust and control over openness. Leading to assumptions of private chat over public knowledge and algorithmic mediation over human responsibility. Then they push focus to rebuild the same broken structures again and again while calling it “innovation”.

That’s the real story of the last ten years, we inherited working social and technical traditions, then forgot why they worked. Now we’re drowning in signal-to-noise, fake “governance”, performative moderation, invisible power structures, startup logic and endless #fashionista churn.

The answer is probably much simpler than people want – public media, open processes, visible governance, trust networks, federation, and rebuilding commons culture from the ground up #KISS. Start reading the story flow https://hamishcampbell.com/stories/ and if you like semi hard definitions you can dip in here https://hamishcampbell.com/hashtags/ and for a bit of history of the #OMN path the Fediverse piece https://hamishcampbell.com/what-happened-over-the-last-ten-years-on-our-fediverse-path/

And yes, this matters beyond tech culture, because while people are busy polishing identities and building another pointless #techshit platform layer, the world is burning – #climatechaos, collapsing public infrastructure, rising authoritarianism and corporate enclosure of every part of public life. So yes, we need “alt sense” – alternative common sense – or we are genuinely beaten, not only in an abstract future way, but in ten years in a “rubber truncheons and floodwater” way.

Make the effort to understand the path built from alt common sense history, or we’ll keep repeating the same mistakes until there’s nothing left worth defending.

A fluff view of current tech we need to compost

You know, when people are heading over a cliff, I’m more than happy to be “left behind“.

This story is #openwashing, not innovation. “New European social network” is actually a fork of #Bluesky wrapped in sovereignty language, as Elena Rossini says with the same #dotcons logic – PR-first launch (Davos), reality comes later (or never). This tech mess illustrates, if people start with branding, funding, and media narrative instead of community and process, it’s not #openweb – it’s #closedweb in a mask, when people ignore existing commons is easy to see the red flag.

Why is this a mess? Existing working systems: #Fediverse (e.g. Mastodon), RSS, open standards, were ignored or dismissed as “non-scalable” or “non-monetizable” so there plan is reinventing the wheel → badly. With “scaling” used as an excuse for control with claims that the #fediverse “can’t scale” and “needs monetization”. The simple reality is scaling here is an old story of centralising control + extracting value.

Let’s look at this from a native view of grassroots scale = trust, diversity, human limits vs corporate scale vs control, extraction, surveillance. They are different processes → different outcomes with ID verification = anti-commons architecture. What this creates is exclusion, surveillance, and power asymmetry. This shallowly hidden #dotcons path flips the #openweb model from permissionless participation to controlled access and tracking. It’s not a public space – it’s “smiling” infrastructure for governance and policing.

Let’s look at how the media failed as it’s a part of the problem, journalists repeated press releases with no technical or cultural literacy, leading to the #mainstreaming mythology of “first European network” unchallenged, this cultural memory hole is a recurring mess we need to compost. The outcome is every shallow reboot looks “new”.

This feeds the real divide in tech vs culture. You see the same split again on the dev side: forks protocols, builds platforms → ignores social process. And on the activist side: understands community → stuck in Facebook/Slack. Without combining both you either get silos or you get capture. One useful way of seeing this is to follow the money, to see the outcome of investor-driven, marketing-heavy teams with “Monetization” as a core requirement. Funding-first projects don’t build commons, they build exits, leverage and control systems.

It should be obviously – nobody should be surprised that this liberal pushing of “Sovereignty” is being hijacked, using #EU branding as legitimacy. This is the #eurowashing of #dotcons models we touched on at the start. Real “sovereignty”, what ever it means, lives in open protocols, distributed governance and local autonomy. Not in a branded platform, or the nation state any more – thus the danger is confusion. People will still join because “it’s European”, “it’s new” and “it sounds ethical”. Thus, the problem isn’t only evil actors – it’s signal-to-noise collapse.

What this means for projects like the #OMN (the actionable bit). This whole story reinforces the core path – that we focus on stopping building “new platforms” to start composting what already exists. A common’s strategy using existing protocols (#ActivityPub, RSS), rooted in grassroots trust networks. Keep processes open (#4opens) to accept human-scale limits then scale by federate for reach, not control.

The #WSocial mess shows exactly what happens when you strip the #openweb of its culture and replace it with PR, funding, and control. Our native path is the opposite, growth from the commons. Its #KISS or you just recreate the problem.

The Smile

By William Blake

There is a Smile of Love 

And there is a Smile of Deceit 

And there is a Smile of Smiles

In which these two Smiles meet 

And there is a Frown of Hate 

And there is a Frown of disdain 

And there is a Frown of Frowns

Which you strive to forget in vain 

For it sticks in the Hearts deep Core 

And it sticks in the deep Back bone 

And no Smile that ever was smild 

But only one Smile alone

That betwixt the Cradle & Grave

It only once Smild can be 

But when it once is Smild 

Theres an end to all Misery 

Treating everything as personal conflict is a dead end

Let’s focus on being honest, the most exhausting and destructive habit in activist and alternative tech spaces is the blinded reflex to turn disagreement into personal conflict. Someone challenges an idea, and it becomes an attack, names a pattern of behaviour, and suddenly it’s a vendetta. Someone points at structural problems and gets accused of targeting individuals. This is #stupidindividualism in its purest form, and it’s #nothingnew.

It’s not only about difficult personalities or bad intent, it’s the result of forty years of #neoliberal conditioning. The #deathcult of “common sense” market logic has trained us to see everything as personal, personal responsibility, personal success, personal failure, personal conflict. The frameworks for understanding structural problems have been stripped away, so when structural problems are talked about, people fall back on the only tool they’ve been given – finding someone to blame.

The result is nasty and predictable, good projects collapse into personality clashes, needed critiques get dismissed as personal attacks. The real issues will be the systemic mess that needs composting, never get addressed, because everyone is too busy dealing with the drama. This is #deathcult doing what it’s designed to do – keep us fighting each other instead of the system.

So why do we struggle to see this mess, it’s mostly invisible to the people caught inside it as people feel like they’re responding reasonably to real problems, and sometimes they are. But the frame – “this person is the problem” – is almost always wrong as this mess runs like background software, it shapes perception before conscious thought kicks in. A structural critique goes in, a personal accusation comes out – not because people are stupid, but because that’s how they’ve been trained to interpret things.

This is why telling people to “be less defensive” or “think structurally” rarely works. Were asking people to change behaviour without changing the environment that produces it. Culture follows structure, if we want different behaviour, we need different processes, practices, and spaces.

How we actually compost this? It isn’t about perfection, it’s about having better tools – some practical shovels (like the #OMN) to use to name the pattern, not the person, when things start getting personal, we simply shift the frame. “This feels like it’s turning into a personal conflict, but the issue is actually how we’re making decisions” works better than “you’re being defensive.” One opens space, the other closes it.

  • Build processes before you need them, don’t wait for conflict to figure out how to handle it. Groups that survive disagreement usually have simple, visible processes in place: how decisions happen, how issues get raised, who mediates. This is what #4opens and #OGB are for – use them early.
  • Separate decision-making from chat as most drama lives in chat spaces – WhatsApp, Discord, comment threads are optimised for reaction, not reflection. If decisions happen there, we’ll get reactive, personalised outcomes. Move important decisions into slower, more visible, documented spaces.
  • Make structural problems visible as vagueness fuels personalisation – Clear statements like “our funding model creates dependency” or “new people can’t influence decisions” give people something real to work on. Without that clarity, frustration gets directed at individuals.
  • Actively grow a different culture, its slow, but it works. Model structural thinking by rewarding people who name patterns rather than blame individuals. Create spaces where “this process isn’t working” is normal. Over time, this shifts what feels like common sense.
  • Let people step back without drama, not everyone can work in structurally-aware, non-hierarchical spaces right now, that’s OK. If leaving a project becomes a crisis, everything becomes personal. Lower the stakes, reduce the pressure, and personalisation drops.
  • Compost failure publicly, when things go wrong, talk about what failed, not who failed.
    The #openweb keeps reinventing broken wheels because we don’t compost our mistakes. Honest, structural post-mortems build shared learning.

The deeper work is that none of this is quick. The #deathcult didn’t embed itself over decades by accident, and it won’t disappear because of a few good arguments. People don’t think their way out of (stupid)individualism, they experience their way out.

What works is repetition of building spaces that function differently, showing that collective approaches work and sticking with it long enough for that experience to become normal. That’s the path of #OMN not only focusing on fixing people, not that only the right language solves everything. The path is #KISS, building open, trust-based, structurally honest systems – and composting the failures along the way – we slowly shift what “common sense” looks like.

The work is slow, practical, and unglamorous, the shovel is structure, the compost is honesty. The soil is what grows when we stop treating every problem as someone’s fault. Pick up the shovel, there’s a lot to get through.

#OMN #4opens #KISS #nothingnew

The Fluffy/Spiky Debate and the Trolls in Between

The fluffy/spiky tension is one of the oldest and least resolved arguments in activist and grassroots organising spaces. It’s real, it’s necessary, and it’s been exploited. Let’s name the grounding first.

The Fluffy Position

Fluffy politics is about inclusion, emotional safety, consensus, and non-confrontation. At its best it builds welcoming spaces, holds diverse people together, and prevents the macho posturing that drives people away from radical movements. Fluffy people are doing the invisible emotional labour that keeps groups functioning. Without them, most grassroots projects collapse into ego wars.

At its worst, fluffy becomes conflict avoidance dressed as principle. Real problems don’t get named,difficult people don’t get challenged. The group becomes a feelings-management exercise rather than an organising force. Nothing spiky – meaning nothing that actually confronts power – ever gets done, because confrontation itself has been pathologised.

The Spiky Position

Spiky politics embraces confrontation, directness, and a willingness to name uncomfortable truths regardless of who gets upset. At its best it cuts through bullshit, holds people accountable, and actually frightens the powerful rather than merely inconveniencing them. Spiky people often do the work nobody else wants to do – the hard conversation, the direct action, the refusal to pretend things are fine when they aren’t.

At its worst, spiky becomes machismo with a political justification. Aggression gets mistaken for radicalism, burning things down feels more satisfying than building. People who raise concerns about tone or process get dismissed as weak, co-opted, or bourgeois. The movement shrinks to whoever can tolerate the bad atmosphere.

The Debate

The genuine fluffy/spiky debate is worth having. Movements need both tendencies and the tension between them is productive when it’s honest. Fluffy without spiky produces nice shallow groups that change nothing. Spiky without fluffy produces effective alienators who also change little, just more dramatically. The balance is hard and context-dependent – what works on a picket line is different from what works in a community meeting, which is different again from what works online.

The problem is this debate rarely gets had with any honestly, because of a third character type who poisons the the change and challange path.

The Passive-Spiky Fluffy Troll

This is the one that needs naming clearly. This character tends to presents as fluffy. They speak the language of care, inclusion, and safety. They invoke consensus, call for kindness, and position themselves on the moral high ground of the group. But their actual behaviour is spiky in the most destructive possible way – not the honest confrontational spiky that names real problems, but a passive, weaponised spiky that:

  • Distracts – derails productive conversations with tone policing, and hurt feelings at strategic moments
  • Decides – makes unilateral calls while performing consultation, using the language of consensus to smuggle through their own blinded preferences
  • Destroys – systematically undermines people and projects they find threatening, always with plausible deniability, always from behind the shield of their own stated good intentions

They are, in effect, trolls. Not the obvious aggressive troll who can be identified and dealt with, but something more insidious – the troll wearing a fluffy third-bear costume, all warmth on the surface, all disruption underneath.

The Character Types

The Tone Policer – Never engages with substance, always has a concern about how something was said. Uses the language of trauma and safety to shut down challenges to their comfort or control. Allies with whoever seems most aggrieved at any given moment.

The Consensus Hijacker – Performs collective process while actually steering outcomes. Calls meetings, sets agendas, summarises discussions in ways that happen to always reflect their own narrow position. If challenged, expresses deep hurt that their commitment to the group is being questioned.

The Concern Troll – Agrees with the goal in principle, always. Just has concerns. So many concerns. The timing isn’t right, the framing is off, this might alienate people, have we really thought this through. Concern is infinite and self-replenishing, ensuring nothing ever moves forward.

The Moral Credentialist – Collects grievances and allyships like armour. Their identity and stated commitments make them immune to criticism. Any challenge to their behaviour becomes an attack on the community they represent. This is the most effective variant because it recruits others to their defence automatically.

The Exhaustion Engine – Doesn’t block directly, just makes everything take so long, require so much emotional management, and generate so much process overhead that the capable people eventually leave. Wins by attrition.

What To Do

Treat them as trolls. Not with hostility – that plays into their framing – but with the same basic approach you’d use for any bad-faith actor in a shared space:

  • Don’t feed the performance. Engaging earnestly with endless concern-raising rewards the behaviour.
  • Name the pattern, not the person. “This keeps happening and it’s blocking us” is more useful than “you are doing this deliberately.”
  • Keep moving. Don’t let process objections halt action indefinitely. Document, note the objection, proceed.
  • Protect the genuinely fluffy people. Real fluffy organisers are valuable and they’re often the first casualties of passive-spiky trolling, because they’re the most susceptible to guilt and the most invested in harmony.

The fluffy/spiky debate is needed, but the passive-spiky fluffy troll makes sure it never happens properly. Naming them is the first step to composting the mess they make.

Turning stress, conflict, and exhaustion into commons culture instead of mutual destruction

People resist visible structure

Freedoms are not given, they are taken.
— Peter Kropotkin

This post comes from real life experience with #Oxfordboaters, but I am going to address it as a tech problem as it is the same mess we need to work on composting in our social tech projects.

People don’t actually hate structure, what they tend to resist is visible structure – the kind we need to make visible so we can see, question, and challenge. At the same time, they’re always perfectly comfortable inside invisible structures – because they feel natural, neutral and just “the way things are.” This is the blinded social mess we’ve inherited and now need to focus on composting for rebalancing.

Invisible structures are things like platform algorithms shaping what we see, informal hierarchies deciding whose voice carries and cultural norms that reward some behaviour and sideline others. Because these aren’t named or surfaced, they don’t feel like control, even when they are. That’s why the #dotcons path works so well, controlling power is everywhere, but hard to point at.

Visible structures, on the other hand – mythos, traditions, governance, open processes – feel uncomfortable. They can look rigid, political, or “too much”, but they’re also the only place where accountability can actually exist. If you can see the structure, you can change it.

This is the tension at the heart of the current #openweb mess we need to compost. When we avoid visible structure, we don’t get freedom – we just default back to hidden power of informal gatekeeping replacing explicit governance, were influence concentrates quietly, the same “common sense” patterns reappear, just harder to challenge.

So if we’re serious about #OMN, we need to flip this instinct by making structure visible, keeping it simple (#KISS), keeping it open (#4opens) and accept the discomfort that comes with that, because that discomfort is where real participation lives.

The work isn’t to eliminate structure – it’s to surface it, soften it, and make it accountable. That’s the composting process, taking the invisible, unspoken mess and turning it into something we can actually grow from.

If we don’t do this, we just keep rebuilding the same hidden systems we say we’re trying to escape.

The #encryptionist detour

The #encryptionist detour

Let’s look back to before the #Fediverse, to be honest about the last two decades of #openweb failure, for a long time we got pulled off the path. Not only by enemies, but by a mix of fear, fashion, and half-understood technical “solutions” that felt right to fearful people at the time.

The rise of the dogmatic, blinded #encryptionist mindset came out of real conditions of mass surveillance revelations (Snowden era), common sense #neoliberal distrust of states and corporations and the real harms of our worship of the (same neoliberal) #deathcult of the #dotcons

Encryption mattered – and still does – private space matters, protection matters. But what happened next at this time is where things went wrong – we shifted focus from necessary tool to blinded totalising path. For the #geekproblem and its fashionista followers – encryption shifted from being a tool in the stack to the answer to everything.

Instead of asking what should be public? – what should be private? And how do we build shared, accountable space? We got a flattened answer of “make everything encrypted and trustless” that sounds good to the blinded fear filled crew as It feels “safe”. But if you are not blind, it obviously undermines the foundations of the #openweb we were working to reboot, the #openweb isn’t built on secrecy – it’s built on shared visibility, trust, and negotiation.

This was mess, enter #blockchain and #DAO – the peak of the detour, this is where the #fashionista layer really took over. Into this already confused path stepped #blockchain, #NFT’s and #DAO governance models of token economies. The mess making was wrapped in smoke and mirrors language of decentralisation, autonomy and trustlessness to “fixing governance”.

But look at what they actually did – financialisation of everything, instead of building commons, we got tokens, ledgers, “market” incentives leading to speculation. This is a very easy to see failed imagination of market logic reintroduced through the back door of wealth = power, not in any way new, it’s smoke and mirrors to hide the same old system the native #openweb path was supposed to move beyond. This detour directly contradicts gift economies, commons-based governance and trust-based collaboration, it was used to push this needed path out of sight.

    It’s the normal mess of fear based #stupidindividualism – governance avoidance disguised as governance. DAOs didn’t in any way solve governance, they simply avoided it as real governance is messy, social, contextual, rooted in trust and relationships. DAOs tried and failed to replace this with hard voting mechanisms, token-weighted decisions and rigid rules. That’s not in any way useful governance, that’s automation of power to remove the human layer instead of engaging with it, its pure #geekproblem that our #fashionistas were to blind (or self-interested) to see past.

      This is the same problem we are repeating today (still in embryo) with the current new crew taking over pushing the #openweb reboot – this time its not only encryption, but it’s the same mess of shifting focus away from what actually matters, the same distraction.

      What can we compost from the last mess, to shine light on this path, back in the day people were busy writing whitepapers, launching tokens, debating protocol layers. Were they should have been building communities, maintaining infrastructure to grow trust networks to support real-world use #KISS This misdirection of focus, resources and energy is the recurring damage as attention is diverted away from the soil layer into tiny self-interested abstract cliques that never root.

        The #geekproblem and the #NGO loop feed this mess, as the fashionista class capture does not happen in isolation. It is amplified by two reinforcing dynamics – the #geekproblem – preference for technical certainty over social mess, belief that systems can replace relationships, discomfort with ambiguity and lived complexity. The #NGO layer with its need for fundable, legible “solutions”, preference for clean frameworks – over messy reality, career pathways built on producing narratives, not outcomes.

        Put these together, and you get complicated “solutions” that look impressive, but don’t work in practice. Back then we had a decade of drift we need to not repeat now. Back then we ended up with over-engineered systems nobody uses, governance models disconnected from lived communities and fragmented efforts chasing the next “solution”. This weakened focus on building actual alternatives, meanwhile, the #dotcons carried on consolidating power.

        The reality check for today is we built a pile of #techshit, and we are doing the same now with the current takeover crew of the #Fediverse. The last time because we failed to compost the accumulated outcome of the mess of abandoned projects, broken promises, conceptual clutter we still have the current confused direction. We need to now compost this historical mess, as keeping pretending this is fine is part of the problem, it’s not fine. But – and this matters – this “shit” doesn’t need to be useless, it’s compost.

        The native path we didn’t take (but still can), was always simpler, and still is, to build in public (#4opens), separate public and private space (#KISS), focus on trust, not “trustless”, grow from real communities, not closed cliques.

        We need to develop governance as lived practice, not only code, this is what #OMN and #OGB are pointing toward – human networks first, tech as support, not driver, openness as default for shared knowledge, privacy where it actually matters. If we’re serious about a future – it is to stop chasing totalising tech fixes, stop “common sense” financialising community, stop pretending governance can be automated and start growing from the soil up. And most importantly shift from control → collaboration, from abstraction → grounded practice to shift from narrative → lived reality.

        The point is the #encryptionist turn wasn’t (only) evil as it was a reaction to real harm. But it became a dead end when it tried to replace the social with the technical. What we need to lean from this to shift the current mess is if we want a real #openweb we don’t need more “solutions”, we need to get our hands dirty again to compost the mess to make soil to plant something much more real that can grow.

        #openweb #4opens #OGB #OMN #geekproblem #techshit #KISS

        The Crew – Paths to Growth?

        So what path should we be focusing on to balance this current oligarchy mess. The #OMN (Open Media Network) is decentralized, grassroots, focused on an “open process” rather than a fixed, top-down control structure, it’s a governance model:

        • Continuous ecological process, as navigation through lived memory rather than a set of static rules.
        • Decentralized & community-driven, from users, producers/creators, and admins, aiming to balance out central authority.
        • Federated coordination, strong transparency were no one has to agree, but reasoning and actions are publicly visible to produce accountability for public mess making.
        • The #4opens Principles – building on open data, open source, open standards, and open process.
        • Emergent structure, grows organically through “lived collaboration” and social federated tech flows #OGB (Open Governance Body).

        The #OMN is a path to growing an alternative to corporate-controlled platforms (#dotcons), a “public-first” digital commons.

        People resist is visible structure

        The Problem Was Never Just the Platforms – It’s What We Build Instead

        For years, the #fashionista #openweb conversation has been stuck in a loop of naming villains: surveillance capitalism, the #dotcons, Zuckerberg, Musk, “the algorithm.” But focusing on enemies only gets you so far. The creative question isn’t what we’re against – it’s what we’re actually building together to replace it.

        That’s where the #OMN takes a useful path. Yes, the big platforms absorb resistance, repackage it, and sell it back to us, that cycle is real. But pointing it out, again and again, doesn’t break it. In fact, it can become part of the same loop – critique as content, outrage as engagement, nothing changing underneath. The issue isn’t just that the #dotcons are powerful. It’s that we keep rebuilding their patterns, even when we think we’re doing something different.

        This is why the #OMN isn’t framed as a protest, a brand, or a “better platform.” It’s a collective path to build alternatives that don’t reproduce the same failures. Not through ideology alone, but through structure. The #4opens – open code, open data, open standards, open process – aren’t slogans here, they’re foundations. They’re how we walk paths that can be shared, checked, and reshaped collectively, rather than captured and enclosed.

        The same goes for governance, the #OGB isn’t about replacing one centre of power with another, it’s about making sure power doesn’t quietly re-centralise through habit, personality, and convenience. If we don’t actively design for that, we drift straight back into the same patterns, and that drift is the problem.

        People don’t arrive in the #openweb as blank slates. We’ve all been shaped by the systems we’re trying to move beyond. The habits of control, gatekeeping, branding, and individual positioning – what we call #stupidindividualism – come with us. If we don’t consciously challenge that, we just recreate the #dotcons in smaller, messier forms.

        So the focus has to shift, from only critique to construction, balancing individuals to collectives and from blinded platforms to open processes. That means starting with the human network – trust, collaboration, shared purpose – and letting the technology grow out of that. Not the other way around.

        It also means accepting that this work isn’t neat or fast. There’s no clean break, no single “killer app,” no moment where the old control simply disappears. What we have instead is a composting process: breaking down what doesn’t work, reusing what does, and slowly growing something more resilient.

        That’s the revolt, not a personal mission, not a branded alternative, but a collective shift in how we build and relate. If we get that right, the #dotcons stop being the centre of the story, not because they were defeated, but because we’ve made them less relevant.

        And that’s something they can’t easily absorb.

        #OMN #4opens #OGB #openweb

        The Crew – Paths to Growth?

        These people are a problem, the group of people who took over running the #Fediverse from us first wave crew. The problem is that they are liars – not out of malice, but in a blinded, dogmatic way. They arrived in this native #openweb movement already carrying this mindset, and it’s only deepened since. That doesn’t make them personally nasty, but it does make them dangerously incompetent. Why? Because they generate serious signal-to-noise problems, misallocate resources, misplace competency, and shift focus away from what actually matters.

        The problem with https://www.blog-pat.ch/moving-sideways-paths-to-growth/ isn’t that it’s wrong – it’s that it emerges from a closed loop of “truthy” ideas that feel insightful but don’t engage with #openweb material reality. That’s where the blind, dogmatic lying comes in, not malicious, but structurally embedded. It recycles a familiar narrative, classic signal-to-noise inflation, where old ideas are dressed up as insight.

        This group of people abstracts away power and material constraints. “Growth” is framed as an individual mindset or path choice, when in reality sideways movement is shaped by structural limits – the very things the #OMN project is addressing: lack of upward mobility, organisational bottlenecks, precarity, stagnation, and misallocation of labour. That’s the “blind lie”: turning systemic limitation into a personal growth narrative. Not evil, but deeply misleading.

        What we see is the individualist path (#stupidindividualism), centres on the individual journey – your path, your growth, your mindset – with no sense of collective structures, shared infrastructure, governance, or power relations. This is the failure mode we should be composting, instead, the current mess drags “open” thinking back into #neoliberal self-optimisation culture. Rather than asking how we build systems that enable meaningful growth, it asks how you reinterpret your path as growth, that’s a dead end.

        It also contributes to resource and focus drift. This kind of thinking has real consequences for projects like #openweb and #OMN as it encourages endless reframing instead of building – validates drift that weakens focus on the native outcomes and infrastructure we actually need. In practice, it leads to misplaced competency, misallocated effort, and degraded signal. That’s the “dangerously incompetent” part – not personal failure, but systemic impact.

        The deeper issue is that these aren’t bad people, it’s that they are aligned – unthinkingly – with #deathcult thinking by individualising systemic issues and amplifying noise in already fragile spaces. They arrived with this mindset, and the environments they shape reinforce it.

        A grounded approach would ask harder questions: how do we build collective structures that make sideways movement meaningful? Without that, this is just narrative smoothing, smoke and mirrors.

        So to sum up: the post linked above isn’t wrong, it’s worse than that, it’s harmless-sounding, blinded ideology that recycles known ideas, strips out material context, reinforces individualist framing, and adds noise where clarity is needed. In a healthy ecosystem, this would be background chatter, in a struggling one – like the current open social web space – it becomes actively damaging.

        “I headed up to Oxford to a Marmalade Festival event: The World Works on WhatsApp.”

        I’m in Oxford, and I saw that event listed. My reaction was: I can’t stomach that. Still, I probably should have gone, it would have been useful to have that conversation in person.

        Old sod talking about the openweb

        The problem we now face is these people will #gatekeep… if the is no way in or out without there agreement we are going to fail, there is a long history of this mess making. I have seen the same problem people destroy numerous grassroots movements over the 40 years I have been working in this path.

        The personal is not the political – Treating everything as personal conflict is a dead end

        The goal is simple: build tools that serve people, not profit. #KISS

        The End of the “Peace Dividend” and the Return of History

        #Identitypolitics, is what happens when liberalism turns inward and fragments – call it mad liberalism. #Culturewar is what happens when that same liberalism hardens and lashes out – bad liberalism. Both look like opposites, but they come from the same place.

        The uncomfortable part is both were pushed onto the “left” as the way to fight #neoliberalism the very system that’s been tearing apart the social fabric for decades. Instead of building collective power, we pushed endless identity fragmentation, reactive outrage cycles and symbolic battles detached from material change the left is about.

        Energy that could have gone into organising, building, and challenging power structures got redirected into managing discourse and fighting each other. That wasn’t an accident, it was the path of least resistance within a liberal framework that can’t actually confront the roots of the problem, because it’s part of the problem.

        So while people were arguing over representation and language, the underlying mess – what we call the #deathcult – carried on concentrating wealth, hollowing out communities and locking in structural inequality. And now, that same system is producing a hard shift to the right, feed by anger without direction, backlash without solutions and reaction filling the vacuum left by the failure of the “left” to build alternatives.

        So yes, the liberal centre made the mess, but the more important point is this we’re still stuck inside its framing, still reacting, still fighting on terrain that leads nowhere and still avoiding the work of building something that can actually replace what’s failing. Not to dismiss identity or culture – those matter – but to put them back in proportion, grounded in material reality and collective process. Because if we don’t do that, we stay locked in the loop of liberal fragmentation → right-wing reaction → deeper collapse, and this loop doesn’t end well.

        The question isn’t only who to blame, it’s whether we can stop playing the same game long enough to build something else. Let’s look at this from a much wider view.

        For a long time, the dominant mainstreaming story has been that today’s instability is blamed on the anger of the “left-behind” in the West, a neat, comfortable narrative. But this is shallow, as long before discontent surfaced in the US or UK, entire societies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union went through something far more extreme.

        The 1990s transition to #neoliberalism wasn’t just “reform” – it was a peace-time social collapse when life expectancy dropped, savings were wiped out and crime and addiction surged. This “history” matters now because it shows that what we’re living through isn’t new, it’s the long tail of our worshipping of the same #deathcult, that has been breaking societies for decades.

        The illusion of stability from the early 1990s to around 2010, when the world looked unusually stable, even peaceful. Major wars between big powers disappeared, military spending dropped, trade and GDP surged – “Democracy” spread across the globe. This period was framed as success, some even called it the end of history. But this “peace” rested on smoke and mirrors.

        #globalisation as control – economic interdependence was supposed to prevent war, the idea was simple if everyone is economically connected, conflict becomes irrational. What actually happened was production was off shored, labour was weakened in the West, global supply chains became fragile and unequal and wealth concentrated at the top. This wasn’t peace, it was #classwar.

        The fig leaf of “democracy” was always market compliance, less about collective decision-making and more about maintaining economic growth. In practice governments served markets, institutions constrained popular power and politics became technocratic management. In #OMN terms, this is #mainstreaming – reducing real political choices into narrow, “acceptable” to the #nastyfew options.

        The hidden cost was hollow societies, this system did produce growth. But hollowed everything out, communities weakened, industries disappeared, inequality exploded and politics lost meaning. People were told everything was fine, while their lived reality worsened.

        So the anger we see today isn’t sudden, it’s delayed. The imperial layer is power without accountability at the global level, this system was held together by a dominant power structure. And here’s where the cracks deepen as rules applied selectively, international law was a tool, not a constraint, economic systems weaponised as needed. The result was a loss of legitimacy, as when rules are not applied equally, they lift the veil to stop functioning as rules at all.

        We are now moving out of that world back to no longer having a single uncontested centre of power. Instead, we have competing blocs, regional tensions, fragile alliances and increasing militarisation. This is what’s called a multipolar world in #IR terms. Historically, these systems are unstable unless there are shared norms and limits, right now, those norms are weak or collapsing.

        So we understand that the liberal #deathcult logic no longer works, globalisation is fragmenting, states are prioritising more self-sufficiency, supply chain control, strategic industries. The old idea of interdependence is now seen as a risk, not a safeguard.

        Liberal ideas of democracy aren’t stabilising conflict, instead of reducing tension, elections amplify nationalism, reward confrontation leading to deepen division. The “#deathcult peace” is no longer holding, It’s a dangerous feedback loop, that without strong shared “rules”, the mess drifts toward proxy conflicts, regional wars, arms races and escalating mistrust. Even if full-scale war is avoided, instability becomes normal, and this instability feeds back into domestic politics – creating more fear, more reaction, more breakdown.

        The deeper problem is #neoliberal exhaustion, we no longer treat the #deathcult as sacred and with #climatechaos and social break down our deaths are seeping closer. It’s now visible systemic exhaustion of the rule of the #nastyfew who built this era of #neoliberalism to prioritised finance over production, replaced politics with management, concentrated wealth and power and stripped away collective purpose.

        This mess making didn’t resolve contradictions, it displaced them into culture wars, liberal identity conflicts and into abstraction. Now those social control is failing, we see the return of “history” where fundamental questions can’t be avoided anymore:

        • What is the purpose of the state?
        • Who benefits from the economy?
        • What do we protect and why?
        • How do we organise collectively?

        This is uncomfortable, but necessary. As the previous era avoided these questions, this one forces them.

        The #OMN perspective on this mess is compost, don’t collapse, that this moment is not just crisis – it’s raw material. The breakdown of the old system creates space, but we need to use the space, it’s why the #compost thinking matters – don’t deny the mess, don’t romanticise collapse, process it into something usable. Because if we don’t, the vacuum gets filled by reactionary politics, authoritarian control and deeper #mainstreaming mess.

        The “end of history” wasn’t an achievement, it was a pause – built on unstable foundations. What we’re living through now is history restarting, messy, risky, uncertain. But also the first real chance in decades to build something that isn’t just a updated version of the same #deathcult logic. We might build a #lifecult if we can hold our nerve, and actually do the work.

        So what comes next? We are moving from “stability” without meaning to instability with possibility. Yes, that shift is dangerous, but it also reopens agency, the question is no longer
        “how do we maintain the system?” It becomes “what do we build instead?”

        The #KISS choice is the #OMN path to grow new #openweb, grassroots, trust-based structures, or we default fall back into more centralised, extractive systems?

        Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN

        Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN

        Activism has a reputation problem, in default #mainstreaming storytelling it’s painted as chaos, absence, or naive idealism. But if you look at what activists at best actually do, a different picture emerges: a long tradition of people working out, in practice, how to solve real problems together without relying on distant authority. And that’s the bit most people quietly skip.

        In most social/political movements, the hard questions – how we organise, decide, share resources, resolve conflict – are deferred. If people think about this at all – First you win power, then you figure out how things will work. That “later” rarely comes, or when it does, it arrives shaped by hierarchy, bureaucracy, and control.

        The #OMN paths flips this. It starts at the micro level of how do a group of people share space? How do they make decisions without bosses? How do they deal with conflict, mess, bad behaviour, uneven effort and how do they build trust that actually holds under pressure? These are not abstract questions, they are everyday problems.

        And this path – at its best – has decades (centuries, really) of paths with real answers like messy consensus processes, affinity groups, mutual aid, horizontal organising, temporary structures that form and dissolve as needed. None of it perfect, all of it is grounded. This is why grassroots activism works in real situations: disaster response, grassroots organising, protest camps, community projects. Because it doesn’t wait for permission or perfect conditions. It already has tools for acting now.

        The messy bit is it’s not magic, let’s not romanticise this. Horizontal organising is hard, it’s full of friction. You get informal hierarchies, dominant personalities, avoidance of conflict until it explodes and burnout leading to #blocking of uncomfortable but necessary conversations. This is the same “poisonous people” problem you see in every movement. #4opens grassroots activism doesn’t remove it – it exposes it – and that’s actually the point. Instead of hiding dysfunction behind formal power, horizontal spaces push it into the open where it has to be dealt with. Or not – and then things fall apart, which is also a kind of clarity. In #OMN language, this is #compost, the mess isn’t a failure. It’s raw material.

        Why this matters for the #openweb – most digital infrastructure is built on the opposite assumption. The #dotcons model says to centralise control, extract value, smooth over conflict, optimise engagement, hide the mess. It “works” – but only by disempowering people and communities. The #openweb path, if it’s going to mean anything, has to go the other way:

        • decentralised
        • messy
        • trust-based
        • human-scale
        • and able to function anyway

        That last bit is where we can learn from anarchist practice, because building federated, grassroots media (like #OMN, #indymediaback, Fediverse spaces) is not just a technical problem, it’s a social one. The tech already basically works, the people part doesn’t – yet. Micro practice is the missing layer – What we keep hitting is the gap between having tools (#ActivityPub, servers, platforms) and having cultures that can use those tools effectively

        You can spin up a server in an afternoon, you can’t spin up trust, shared norms, or collective process nearly as fast. This is where activist/anarchist thinking helps – not as blinded ideology, but as a toolkit:

        • how to run meetings that don’t collapse
        • how to distribute responsibility without losing coherence
        • how to handle conflict without defaulting to bans or dominance
        • how to balance openness with resilience

        These are the problems that keep blocking #openweb projects. It’s about the clash: horizontal vs “common sense”. One of the biggest tensions is this is people default to vertical “common sense” – someone should be in charge, decisions should be quick, authority should be clear. And in moments of stress, that instinct feels right, but over time, it reproduces the same power structures we’re supposedly trying to move beyond.

        So we get a cycle of start horizontal, hit friction, fall back to informal hierarchy, burn out or fragment then repeat. Balancing this cycle requires conscious practice, not just good intentions. For #OMN, this isn’t theory, it’s practical. If we want a functioning, grassroots media network:

        • we need working horizontal processes
        • we need ways to mediate conflict and #blocking
        • we need to actively compost dysfunction instead of ignoring it
        • we need to balance “fluffy” inclusion with “spiky” clarity and direction

        Otherwise, the social layer collapses long before the tech does. And then the #dotcons win by default, not because they’re better, but because they’re simpler in the short term.

        The real opportunity here is to combine #KISS activist micro-practice (how people actually work together) with #openweb technology (how systems interconnect at scale). That combination is rare, and powerful. It gives us a path that is:

        • grounded (not abstract)
        • scalable (but not centralised)
        • resilient (because it expects mess)
        • and actually usable by normal people, not just #geekproblem specialists

        This path isn’t useful because it promises a perfect future, it’s useful because it takes responsibility for the present. It asks – how do we make this work, here, now, with these people, in this mess? That’s the question the #openweb needs to answer, and if we don’t answer it, the answer we’ll get is more of the same, more #closedweb, more #dotcons, more #deathcult normality.

        If we do answer it – even imperfectly – we start to build something else, something that grows not by control, but by practice.

        #OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)

        #OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)

        #techchurn is the endless cycle of adopting new platforms, tools, and technologies – not because they solve any real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. It burns community trust, institutional memory, and activist energy, while leaving the underlying #nastyfew power structures untouched.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=techchurn

        The #OMN uses #stupidindividualism to describe the culturally manufactured habit of prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective well-being – a behaviour normalised by forty years of #neoliberalism, where people work against their own community and ecological survival while believing they are exercising “freedom”.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=stupidindividualism

        In the #OMN hashtag story, #spiky is the confrontational, direct, and uncompromising tendency within radical movements – the willingness to push back against power, name uncomfortable truths, and refuse to sand down political edges for mainstream comfort.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=spiky

        #RSS is the unglamorous but democratic backbone of the #openweb – a simple, open standard that allows content to flow without the gatekeeping, algorithmic manipulation, and the data hoarding of the #dotcons.

        #reboot is the necessary reset of the #openweb – stepping away from the dead ends of #techshit and #dotcons to rebuild human-centred, trust infrastructure using tools like #activitypub and the #fediverse, guided by the #4opens.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=reboot

        #postmodernism is the cultural current that dissolved shared truth into competing narratives, undermines the foundations needed for collective action – leaving people fragmented, cynical, and unable to build solidarity.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=postmodern

        In the #OMN hashtag story, #Oxford is a grounded example of real-world contradiction – where elitist power (#mainstreaming, #NGO, #deathcult) coexists with genuine grassroots community, making it a test bed for grassroots #openweb organising and the #4opens path.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=Oxford

        In the #OMN hashtag story, #PGA (Peoples’ Global Action) represents horizontal, grassroots, anti-capitalist organising – a prefiguration of the #openweb, built on direct action and solidarity rather than #NGO bureaucracy or #mainstreaming compromise.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=PGA

        In the #OMN path, #p2p means people-to-people before peer-to-peer – real human relationships and trust as the foundation that decentralised tech should serve, not replace.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=p2p

        In the #OMN view, #opensource is not just a licence – it’s a political commitment to transparency, shared ownership, and community control over code, data, and process.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=opensource

        The #openweb is internet infrastructure built on open standards, open-source code, and community control – where users share power – as opposed to the #dotcons, with the #closedweb which enclose and monetise the commons.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=openweb

        #openprocess means decisions and governance happen visibly and participatorily – not behind closed doors, so people can see, challenge, and shape outcomes.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=openprocess

        #opendata means data that is freely accessible and shareable – controlled by communities rather than locked inside corporate silos.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=opendata

        In the #OMN path, #open means building on the #4opens – open code, data, standards, and process as a foundation for technology that serves people, not profit.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=open

        #OMN (Open Media Network) is a grassroots project to build human-centred, trust-based digital infrastructure on the #openweb, grounded in the #4opens and focused on community control over technology.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OMN

        The #OGB (Open Governance Body) is a framework for transparent, inclusive decision-making – replacing hidden power structures with accountable, federated, messy collective governance.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OGB

        In the #OMN story, #nothingnew reminds us that cycles of co-option and failure have all happened before – and ignoring this history is how we repeat mistakes.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=nothingnew

        In the #OMN story, #NGO refers to professionalised activism that defuses radical politics – replacing grassroots power with managed, funder-friendly “dissent”.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=NGO

        In the #OMN path, #neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of markets over people – normalising greed and eroding solidarity into the logic of the #deathcult.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=neoliberalism

        #makinghistory is the practice of communities reclaiming storytelling – building open, living archives rather than leaving history to those in power.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=makeinghistory

        In #OMN usage, #mainstreaming is how radical ideas get absorbed and neutralised – keeping the language while stripping out real challenge.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=mainstreaming

        In the #OMN path, #KISS (“Keep It Simple, Stupid”) is a political stance against the #geekproblem – rejecting unnecessary complexity as a form of control.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=KISS

        #indymediaback is a call to rebuild grassroots, community-controlled media as an alternative to both #dotcons and hollow #NGO media structures.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=indymediaback

        In the #OMN path, a hashtag is not just a label – it’s a node in a shared political vocabulary, building a map of meaning and direction.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=hashtag

        #grassroots means bottom-up organising rooted in real communities – accountable to collective need, not institutions.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=grassroots

        The #geekproblem is the tendency to replace human trust with technical control – embedding narrow values into systems that shape everyone’s lives.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=geekproblem

        In #OMN, #FOSS is a political commitment to collective ownership of technology – not just a licensing model.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=FOSS

        In #OMN language, #fluffy describes feel-good politics that avoid conflict – prioritising comfort over any real change.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fluffy

        #feudalism describes the emerging digital structure where platform owners extract value like lords from dependent users.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=feudalism

        #fascism is what happens when the #deathcult drops its mask – authoritarian control to defend failing systems.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fascism

        On the #OMN path, the #fediverse is practical #openweb infrastructure – decentralised, federated, and not owned by corporations.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fediverse

        #encryptionist describes the tendency to prioritise technical security over social trust – a core expression of the #geekproblem.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=Encryptionist

        #dotcons are corporate platforms built on data extraction and control, presenting themselves as neutral while enclosing the commons.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=dotcon

        In the #OMN story, #DIY means reclaiming the ability to build and organise outside institutional control – grounding politics in practice.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=DIY

        The #deathcult is the self-destructive logic of #neoliberalism – sacrificing social and ecological survival for short-term fear drivern greed.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=deathcult

        In the #OMN story, #compost means breaking down failure and mess into fuel for new growth.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost

        In #OMN, #closedweb is controlled, extractive digital infrastructure where users have no power.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=closed

        #climatechaos describes the accelerating breakdown driven by the #deathcult, beyond manageable “climate change.”
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=climate

        #classwar is the ongoing conflict between the #nastyfew and the communities they exploit – often hidden by #mainstreaming narratives.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=classwar

        #capitalism is the dominant system turning everything – relationships, nature, culture – into “profit”.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=capitalism

        In #OMN, #block is the reflex to shut down challenge – preventing the messy work needed for real change.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=block

        #blinded is being unable or unwilling to see beyond #mainstreaming and #dotcons logic.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=blinded

        #fashernista describes performative activism that prioritises appearance over substance.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fashionistas

        #dotcons are the corporate platforms – Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, YouTube and their kin – whose business model is built on harvesting user data, manufacturing engagement, and converting human attention and community into profit, while presenting themselves as neutral public spaces.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=dotcon

        In the #OMN hashtag story, #DIY means reclaiming the practical capacity to build, organise, and maintain tools and communities outside of corporate and state control – not as a lifestyle choice, but as a political act of grounding radical change in real skills, real trust, and real human relationships rather than outsourcing power to institutions that don’t serve you.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=DIY

        The #deathcult is the #OMN metaphor for the self-destructive logic of forty years of #neoliberalism – an ideology so committed to short-term profit, individualism, and economic growth that it knowingly sacrifices the ecological and social foundations that human life depends on.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=deathcult

        In the #OMN hashtag story, #compost means taking the failures, mistakes, and accumulated mess of past movements and tech projects – rather than discarding or ignoring them – and breaking them down into something that can feed new growth, treating dysfunction and #blocking dead ends as raw material for building better rather than as waste to be hidden.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost

        In #OMN language, #closedweb refers to the controlled digital infrastructure – platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter – built on proprietary code, extractive business models, and centralised power, where people have no meaningful control over their data, their communities, or the rules that govern them.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=closed

        The #deathcult of #neoliberalism has driven us past the point where “climate change” – with its implication of manageable, orderly shifts – remains any honest description of what we face now. What we actually have is #climatechaos: cascading, systemic breakdown of the ecosystems, weather patterns, and social structures that human civilisation depends on, accelerating faster than institutions built on forty years of market logic are capable of, or willing to, address.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=climate

        #classwar is the ongoing and unacknowledged conflict between those who benefit from and actively reproduce the #deathcult of #neoliberalism – the #nastyfew, managing, and credentialed classes – and the communities, workers, and ecosystems they exploit. A conflict that #mainstreaming culture works to render invisible, reframing systemic dispossession as individual failure.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=classwar

        #capitalism is the current common sense – the water we swim in – the economic system that systematically converts collective goods, human relationships, and the natural world into private profit, enforcing this logic through every institution and platform we touch, while presenting itself as the only possible reality.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=capitalism

        In the #OMN hashtag story, #block refers to the reflexive, unconscious tendency of individuals and communities to shut down unfamiliar and challenging ideas, people, and processes – a defensive gesture rooted in #stupidindividualism and #postmodernism that prevents the trust-building and messy collective work needed for real #openweb organising.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=block

        #blinded refers to being so captured by #mainstreaming tech orthodoxy and ideological “common sense” – particularly #neoliberalism and #dotcons culture – that you no longer see, or refuse to see, the harms those systems cause or any alternative paths that exist outside them.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=blinded

        #fashernista describes a person in progressive or radical spaces who prioritises the appearance and aesthetic of activism – the right look, language, and social positioning – over the unglamorous, difficult work of actually building lasting structural change.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fashionistas

        If you want, the next step is to cluster these into a clean “chapter flow” (roots → mess → behaviours → solutions) so this stops being just a glossary and becomes a narrative tool.

        These are the foundation tags – the ones everything else grows out of – the overall project: grassroots, trust-based, human-centred media infrastructure

        #openweb – the political/technical terrain we’re trying to reclam

        #4opens – the non-negotiable baseline (open code, data, standards, process)\openprocess – visible, participatory decision-making as default

        #grassroots – bottom-up power, not institutional mediation

        This cluster is about legitimacy, if it’s not grounded in these, it drifts into #NGO capture or #dotcons logic quickly. This is the “native soil” everything else either grows from or gets rejected by.

        The Problem Space (what we’re composting), these tags describe the mess we’re in – the stuff we don’t ignore, but break down.

        #deathcult (neoliberalism as destructive common sense)

        #neoliberalism – 40 years of market logic shaping behaviour

        #dotcons – corporate capture of digital space

        #closedweb – controlled, extractive infrastructure

        #mainstreaming – dilution and co-option of radical ideas

        #NGO – managed dissent and professionalised politics

        #classwar – underlying structural conflict

        This is the compost heap, you don’t fix this directly, you don’t “win” against it head-on. You break it down, reuse what’s useful, and grow alternatives around and through it.

        The #geekproblem Layer (tech distortions) is where things go wrong in implementation.

        #geekproblem – replacing social trust with technical control

        #techchurn – endless pointless rebuilding

        #encryptionists – over-prioritising technical purity over social reality

        #KISS – counterbalance: keep things simple and usable.

        This cluster is why good ideas fail, not because the ideas are wrong, but because the tools and culture get shaped by people who don’t understand social process. This is where most #openweb projects die.

        Cultural/Behavioural Patterns (how people act). The human layer – messy, unavoidable, and central.

        #stupidindividualism – learned self-interest over collective good

        #postmodernism – fragmentation of shared meaning

        #fluffy – avoidance of conflict, feel-good paralysis

        #spiky – necessary confrontation and edge

        #block – reflex rejection of challenge

        #blinded – inability to see outside dominant narratives

        #fashernista – prioritising appearance over substance

        This is the real battlefield, not tech, not policy – behaviour. If you don’t mediate this layer, everything collapses back into dysfunction, no matter how good your structure is.

        The Alternative Infrastructure (what we build), are the actual tools and practices that make change possible.

        #fediverse – decentralised network as a base layer

        #activitypub – the protocol glue

        #RSS – simple, open distribution backbone

        #p2p – people-to-people first, tech second

        #FOSS / #opensource – shared ownership of tools

        #opendata – accessible, non-extractive information

        These only work if rooted in the first cluster, otherwise they get captured and turned into another layer of the #closedweb.

        Governance & Process (how we hold it together). Where most projects fail – or succeed.

        #OGB – structured, open governance

        #openprocess – again, because it’s that important

        #DIY – practical ownership and responsibility

        Without this, informal power takes over. You end up with hidden hierarchies, gatekeeping, and eventual burnout. With it, you get messy but functional collective control.

        Practice & Direction (how we move).

        #reboot – reset and rebuild from working patterns

        #indymediaback – learning from past grassroots media

        #makinghistory – documenting and owning our narratives

        #nothingnew – grounding in historical cycles

        This cluster stops you repeating mistakes, without it, every new wave thinks it’s inventing something new and walks straight into the same traps.

        Grounding Example Layer

        #Oxford – real-world test bed of contradictions

        #PGA – historical example of horizontal organising

        Without grounding, this all drifts into theory, these are example tags anchoring it in lived practice, where things break, and where they can actually work.

        The Meta Layer (how to use this)

        #compost – break down failure into growth

        This is the key to the whole thing – Don’t try to “fix” the mess. Don’t try to “win” cleanly, you compost:

        bad behaviour → learning

        failed projects → patterns

        conflict → structure

        Final point (this matters) is the mistake people make is trying to tidy this into a neat theory, reduce it to messaging, turn it into a fixed ideology. That kills it, this clustering is not about control – it’s about navigation.

        The mess stays messy, but now people can walk through it without getting lost.If you don’t cluster this stuff, it turns into a wall of noise. The mess is useful.

        People pushing vertical common sense over horizontal process are prats

        People who push vertical common sense over horizontal process are absolute prats and sadly all to normal. But they’re not just individual “prats”, there our prats – they’re the default outcome of how most people have been trained to think and act. Vertical thinking feels natural because it’s everywhere. Schools, workplaces, government, media, all teach the same pattern – someone decides, others follow, outcomes are judged quickly and conflict is suppressed or escalated.

        So when people enter horizontal spaces – like a Fediverse project, a grassroots group, or something like #Oxfordboaters – they don’t suddenly become different people, they bring that invisible conditioning with them. That’s why you get the messy behaviour we need to compost – pushing for quick decisions instead of slow consensus, defaulting to authority (“someone should just decide this”), treating disagreement as a problem to shut down, not work through leading to valuing efficiency overtrust.

        From a #OMN perspective, this isn’t an edge case, it’s the mainstreaming pressure coming into horizontal paths. And here’s the uncomfortable bit – if you don’t design for this, vertical logic will always win, not because it’s better, but because it’s simpler, faster, and culturally reinforced.

        So what’s actually going on (under the hood) is that horizontal process is hard because it depends on things most common sense paths ignore – trust (which takes time), shared context (which is uneven), emotional labour (which is invisible) and conflict mediation (which is messy). Vertical “common sense” cuts through all that by skipping the hard parts, that’s why people tend to fall back to it, especially under stress.

        The mistake we can make in grassroots paths – that calling people out as “the problem” doesn’t fix this, it just creates another loop of conflict. Because they are the system we’re trying to move beyond, if you push too hard against them, you often just reinforce the behaviour they double down on control, others retreat, trust collapses. It’s a normal problem pattern.

        The useful shift (#OMN path) is instead of “these people are wrecking things” we try “this behaviour needs mediating structurally”. That leads to different responses, so ideas for ways to handle this mess making:

        • Slow the decision layer down as vertical actors thrive on speed, so you build in friction – no instant decisions on complex issues, require visible discussion before action, document context before outcomes. Not to block – but to force process.
        • Separate spaces (this is key). You need different environments for different modes: fast chat → messy, reactive, low trust – working groups → focused, semi-trusted – face-to-face (“whisper fire”) → high trust. Then don’t let chat dictate outcomes, because chat almost always amplifies vertical behaviour.
        • Make process visible and normal, as people push vertical solutions when they can’t see the process working. So write down how decisions happen, show where input goes, reflect outcomes back to the group. This reduces the urge to “just take control”.
        • Route conflict, don’t suppress it, vertical systems suppress or explode conflict – Horizontal systems need to hold it. That means acknowledging disagreement early, moving heated issues out of public chat to use smaller trust groups to work through tension.
        • Build trust anchors, without trust, horizontal systems collapse into power struggles. So you need consistent people doing consistent work, small wins that build confidence, repeated interaction over time. Trust isn’t declared – it accumulates.

        The blunt truth is we won’t get rid of vertical behaviour, ever. What you can do is – stop it from dominating the system, that’s the real job. The #KISS path is people pushing vertical “common sense” aren’t unusual, they’re normal. If you don’t design process to handle that, horizontal projects will slowly turn vertical, so the goal isn’t to fight those people. It’s to build structures where their instincts don’t take over, and where trust, not control, becomes the thing that actually works.