Tag: OMN

America was always violent -You likely just have not noticed

Update: a recent full video showing this – Video stored for the purpose of retaining evidence: WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT – you will have to wait for it to load.

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 so-called “land of the free” has enforced its freedom with fists, guns, and fire.

But over the last 40–50 years, this history was deliberately erased – rewritten, smoothed over, and sold back as Disney-branded rebellion or CNN-framed tragedy. Out of sight, out of mind, out of options. That erasure was bipartisan: Reagan to Clinton, Bush to Obama. The goal was never to release pressure, only to suppress it.

What we’re seeing now is not an “unprecedented crisis.” It’s a return to form. This is the American normal that elitists have spent decades trying to push out of sight. The difference today is simple and deadly: there is 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 shocks the political class isn’t the chaos. It’s that there’s no release valve left, except their own collapse. They’re not afraid of people rising up. They’re afraid the state itself will be held accountable, and lose.

We’ve been here before. The New Deal wasn’t a gift – it was a surrender. After fifty years of robber-baron capitalism, the country was on the brink. Labour revolts, communist organising, anarchist movements – real threats to the state – were everywhere. FDR saw the writing on the wall. The New Deal was a bargain: here’s a little back, don’t take the rest. It worked, temporarily, because people still had leverage.

Since then, every president has tried to keep the lid on, offering less and less while weaponising the “culture war” as distraction. By the Clinton era, the deal was complete:

  • Deregulate the economy.
  • Outsource everything.
  • Privatise what remains.
  • Turn politics into spectacle.
  • Let the pressure build – but never release it.

And now we’re here, a poisoned society after forty years of #deathcult worship. The political class stands naked before accelerating #climatechaos and social breakdown, stripped of its sacred robes.

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

This should terrify the #nastyfew propping up this system. People are still numbed, distracted, transactioned, algorithmically isolated – barely able to imagine a world otherwise. But the pressure continues to build. The greatest mistake the ruling class has made is believing this can go on forever, that there are no consequences, that people will always submit if fed enough Netflix, fentanyl, and Uber Eats.

History doesn’t work that way. When a government wages war on its own people, it eventually loses, not because the people are strong, but because the state is brittle. The central lie of technocratic rule is that you can govern without trust, coerce without violence, suppress without blowback. That myth has shattered, collapse is no longer a theory, it’s a trajectory.

So what now? We rebuild beyond collapse. This is where our work begins. #OMN, #indymediaback, the #openweb – these aren’t lifestyle choices or nice ideas. They are survival infrastructure.

We can’t wait for a revolution that will never be televised or appear in algorithmic feeds. We can’t expect institutions to reform themselves. We need public spaces without paywalls, media without gatekeepers, technology that serves people, not platforms and governance that grows from below, not imposed from above.

This isn’t just political, it’s existential. The choice isn’t “radicalism” versus “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 this. Most of us 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?

We need a better conversation about ideology, sociology, and the #openweb. A good place to start is 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 from the #mainstreaming 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.

We can find examples of 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, #KISS 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 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. closeness? 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. And if you say 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?

Interesting look at a #4opens project notice “”Strict scrutiny” means that any measures instituted for security must address a compelling community interest, and must be narrowly tailored to achieve that objective and no other. ” We have come a long way from this with our #encryptionsist agenders.

Capitalism is a hostage situation -Not an economy

There are meany sides to the current mess, it’s worth looking at them. An example the #mainstreaming path of paywalls stacked on paywalls isn’t any real life, it’s a trap, which 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 is not a functioning economy, it’s not in any way 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 need to engineer 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 sometimes 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 digitally fenced off. Platform by platform. App by app. Cookie banner by paywall.

This enclosure now defines much of our tech infrastructure, in this #mainstreaming 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 only 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 is #KISS – Stop being a prat

We have strong passive #blocking of real change and challenge, that 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 their 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 useful things, so, what does “not being a prat” look like?

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

Why this matters, because the #nastyfew people seizing power, 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

The new right weaponizing culture: The right goes post-liberal

Let’s have a look at an example of the new mess we’re facing: JD Vance – author, venture capitalist, convert Catholic, and now Vice President. He’s not a Reaganite libertarian, nor a traditional conservative. Instead, Vance represents something more dangerous: a dogmatic ideology, born in the boardrooms of tech billionaires and the seminaries of Catholicism, forged on in the #dotcons, and now pushing American politics into very #fascist territory.

This isn’t politics as normal any more, it’s not even the liberal idea of populism. While there’s grifting (of course) and plenty of weirdness to laugh at, Vance and his fellow travellers are deadly serious. They are actively wielding state power – not to protect liberal values, but to bury them. They’ve declared the Enlightenment dead. The compromise that held Western democracies together for centuries? Thrown out. In its place, they want to sack the referee and replace him with a priest, a general, and a patriarch. All under the rallying cry of “Culture in Crisis.”

Vance’s origin myth is the breakdown of the American family, as told through is book Hillbilly Elegy – addiction, poverty, and social collapse in the white working class. The story pushed him through the Thiel-funded ranks of the #techbro elitists. But he didn’t stop at diagnosis, the next step is to legislate culture, to grasp state power and use it to impose the narrow vision of the #nastyfew onto everyone else.

This isn’t nostalgia and posturing, it is a fully operational political project, rooted in religion, nationalism, and “family”. It’s about dismantling the old #mainstreaming and replacing it with a closed fortress ideology. Neutrality in courts and bureaucracy? Gone. Education? To be weaponised. History? To be rewritten. Opponents? To be punished. This is a hard right revolution, bulldozing the old order as a prerequisite for building the new. “The System Is the Enemy.” Libertarian economics are dismissed as rootless; personal liberty as decadent. Academia, journalism, and law are painted as captured by postmodern “wokeism”, a hegemonic structure that must be ripped out like a tumour. This feeds the mess of confusion that is right/left politics.

This isn’t rhetorical, i’s actionablem seize the Ford Foundation’s assets, fire the civil servicem override the courts. Vance quotes Andrew Jackson: “The Chief Justice has made his ruling; now let him enforce it.” This is a revolution, not of the people, but for the #nastyfew. At its heart is a revival of ethno-nationalism. Where American identity once leaned for a time on shared civic values, not shared blood, they now champion a mythic “homeland” of “legacy Americans” and cemetery plots. A culture you must inherit to belong. Don’t have children? You’re a “childless cat lady”, a punchline and a pariah. Public servant without offspring? Then you have “no commitment to the future.” It’s an ideological border wall: to belong, you must believe in the right God, live in a traditional family, and descend from the right people. Everyone else? Suspect, and/or disposable.

This isn’t simple reactionary, it’s counter-Enlightenment. The appeal is clear: it speaks to the spiritual hollowness of late capitalism – to the loneliness, the nihilism, the disconnection. And liberal technocracy, the ruling ideology of the last 40 years, has failed utterly to address this. The #deathcult of managerial neoliberalism left a void. Now the New Right wants to fill it, with hierarchy, obedience, and repression.

But it should be obvious that this right-wing “solution” is catastrophic. Meaning cannot be mandated by the #nastyfew. Culture cannot be enforced by fiat. This “pluralism” is not a flaw, it’s the messy reality of modern life. Pretending you can erase difference and enforce unity is delusional. Movements that try always end in repression, exclusion, and worse. What begins as a culture war ends as a culture purge.

A liberal view of this hard right push

So what can we do? This is where the #OMN – Open Media Network – matters more than ever. Not to magnify the mess, but to mediate it. The #OMN is a native, grassroots alternative to both the hollow liberal centre and the authoritarian push of the right. It doesn’t build through imposition. It builds through federation, dialogue, and trust. Our path is transparent, accountable, and open-source – not sacred, secret, and top-down. Where the hard right sees liberalism’s emptiness and tries to fill it with obedience and dogma, we recognise the same void, and fill it with commons, care, and co-creation.

Please, don’t worship either the old or the new #deathcult. The #MAGA movement preaches high-control authoritarian ideology with priests in expensive suits. This is why #openweb, our own peer-to-peer culture of meaning, is needed. If we don’t build this path, then yes, the future will be built by people like JD Vance and the rotting Trump dynasty. And it won’t be a future you can simply opt out of.

So stop dithering. Don’t be a prat about it. The time to build the alternative is now.

https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

https://unite.openworlds.info

Trying to Remember: A Personal Reflection on Activist Histories and Memory Holes

Looking back on the activist groups I’ve been part of over the past few decades, I find myself drawn into the messy business of memory. Not nostalgia, something more grounded than that. A desire to trace what actually happened: why things unfolded the way they did, what they meant politically and personally, and what we can still learn from them.

But this work isn’t easy. Many of the people I worked alongside carry completely different versions of events. They remember different turning points, attribute success or failure differently, or sometimes choose to forget altogether. Writing about this – even carefully – risks reopening wounds. It challenges settled myths. It can feel uncomfortable, even unkind.

So the question keeps coming back: is it worth trying? I think the answer is yes. Painful, imperfect, but necessary. As George Santayana famously wrote: “Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.”

And in our small corner of the world – radical media, grassroots tech, DIY networks – repetition is a real problem. The cycle of reinvention is one of the most frustrating aspects of media activism. We keep rebuilding the same tools, replaying the same conflicts, falling into familiar traps. Why? Because we don’t do history well.

More precisely, we don’t keep our history. Websites disappear, servers shut down, backups are lost, and mailing lists become unreadable. Entire communities vanish almost overnight, leaving little trace beyond broken links and half-remembered stories. The next wave arrives thinking they are starting from zero.

This amnesia isn’t accidental; it’s cultural. There’s an ingrained tendency within activism to assume: “We invented this. This is new. We’re the first.” I’ve heard this countless times from people who are thoughtful and brilliant. It’s not arrogance, it’s isolation. A lack of intergenerational knowledge transfer. The result is predictable. Each new cycle repeats the mistakes of the last, often with shinier tools and worse outcomes.

Another reason to document our own histories is simple: if we don’t, someone else will, and they may not understand what actually mattered. Academic and institutional accounts often rely on authoritative sources: funded projects, named leaders, official reports, and neat case studies. That’s understandable, but it means messy grassroots realities frequently disappear from the record.

Grassroots work rarely fits institutional narratives. It’s decentralised, anonymous, improvised, sometimes deliberately undocumented for safety or principle. Yet when official histories are written, these messy spaces are where the real change happened. In truth, many of the most effective projects I’ve been part of were born in squats, kitchens, backrooms, chaotic email threads, and improvised hacklabs. They weren’t polished; they were alive.

Take #Indymedia, I was there to helped build and maintain parts of it. It transformed online publishing and participatory journalism. For a time, it worked remarkably well, until it didn’t. Its decline wasn’t just about technical debt or burnout. We lacked strong practices for documenting process and preserving institutional memory. When fragmentation came, there was no shared record to return to, only fragments, myths, and personal recollections.

That experience is part of why I later focused on projects like #OMN (Open Media Network), alongside #indymediaback and #makinghistory. These are attempts to embed memory into infrastructure itself: to preserve process as well as outcomes, to balance individual and collective histories, and to resist co-option by institutional gatekeeping and #NGO driven narratives.

So should we document activist histories? Yes, because we keep losing what we build. Yes, because new generations deserve shoulders to stand on, not endless reinvention. And yes, because remembering is a political act.

But we need to do this carefully. With plural narratives rather than single heroes. With archives that hold disagreement instead of smoothing it away. We need to document failure alongside success, not as shame, but as compost for future growth.

And we need to stop assuming the truth will speak for itself, it won’t, we have to speak it, even when memories clash or perspectives diverge. This isn’t about gatekeeping, it’s about keeping gates open for those who come next.

If you were part of these histories, write your piece, even if it contradicts mine, especially if it does. If you’re building now, take time to look back. Find the old code, talk to the elders, search for the backups, document what you’re doing as you go.

History isn’t just the past, it’s infrastructure.

Let’s build some together.

Rise and Fall of Grassroots #OpenWeb

The #fashionistas are coming https://yewtu.be/embed/u_Lxkt50xOg? It’s time to become more real before this inflow swamps our “native” reboot, if we let them they will consume it and shit it out as more mess. To mediate this shit storm, it’s time to act, please, feel free to repost these web posts, thanks.

To understand where the #Fediverse and the #OpenSocialWeb are heading, and how not to lose our way, we need to reflect on where we’ve come from. The history of grassroots #openweb activism offers both inspiration and hard lessons.

Foundations are built by real people, social movements start local, they begin with people on the margins – those directly affected by injustice – taking action with the tools they have. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, tech projects like #Indymedia were the blueprint: decentralized, radically open, and run by volunteers who trusted each other and worked horizontally. It worked, for a while.

Today, projects like #OMN (Open Media Network), #indymediaback, and #makeinghistory try to learn from that past. They aim to reboot media infrastructure and historical memory, powered by the #4opens: open data, open source, open standards, and open process. We need to remember that this kind of work doesn’t scale by magic, it grows from grounded trust and native infrastructure, not from #VC injections or #NGO grants.

The trap of #NGO thinking is one of the biggest reasons grassroots projects fail, co-optation. When grassroots groups chase funding, they start shifting agendas to fit the funder’s priorities. Slowly, the mission gets neutralized. Culture changes, risk-taking of change and challenge vanishes, the projects to often become empty shells wearing yesterday’s slogans.

This has happened time and again, from later #Indymedia nodes to #EU-funded tech projects that are now more about kickbox reports than what any “user” wonts or the needed basic radical change. We can’t afford to go down this path again in the current #openweb reboot, the Fediverse.

We need Spiky/Fluffy balance, mutual aid that’s not just charity, but infrastructure. That’s where the #Fediverse shines: not just as an alternative platform, but as a parallel public space for organizing, sharing, and then resisting. It has to support both spiky (radical, disruptive) and fluffy (care-focused, relational) approaches.

On these paths, memory matters, projects like #makeinghistory remind us: if we don’t remember our wins and losses, we’ll keep repeating the same mistakes. Documenting not just content but working practice, how decisions were made, what trust looked like, what failed and why – is crucial. History is not just a mirror; it’s compost.

No monoculture, today, #Mastodon is becoming the monoculture of the Fediverse. It’s not evil. But it is dominating to the point of distortion. It’s following NGO-friendly paths and watering down the radical possibilities the #openweb offers. That’s a problem. We need more balance, more useful codebases, more governance experiments. This space is meant to be a garden, not a plantation.

Security isn’t paranoia, it’s culture, security on the #openweb isn’t about creating another bureaucratic nightmare of permissions and logins. It’s about cultural practices, trust, openness, moderation by consent, and keeping things simple. Most of all, it’s about not building what you don’t need, complexity is the enemy of security.

Final thought, to build real alternatives, we need to stop chasing virality and start building resilience. Less hype, more humility. Less “engagement,” more entanglement. And always, a ruthless focus on not becoming the thing we were trying to replace. Let’s not feed the mess. Let’s compost it and grow something better.

Affective Protest vs. Effective Power: From Spectacle to Strategy

What can we learn from the current mess. The protests didn’t fail because people didn’t care. They failed because the system is not built to respond to protest, it’s built to absorb it. We’ve marched for climate justice, taken the streets for peace, rallied for gender freedom, and now we mobilize for Palestine. The awareness is unprecedented. The turnout is historic. But what has shifted?

Police powers expanded. Fossil fuel extraction accelerated, Gaza burns. The truth is: awareness is not power. That’s a bitter pill for many on the #mainstreaming liberal left, who still believe that if we just scream loud enough, someone with authority will finally listen. But listen to what? A million voices chanting through state-sanctioned routes, wrapped in #NGO branding, monitored and shaped by our mobile devices?

This isn’t failure by accident, it’s design. Modern post #neoliberal governance has perfected the art of managing dissent, it doesn’t crush opposition, it curates it. It schedules protest, builds fenced-off “free speech zones” tallies engagement for annual reports. It makes this work by funding the same nonprofits it pretends to oppose to push protest as a pageant, a performance of resistance that never practically interrupt the flows of capital.

Worse than this, it trains us into harmless routines: march, chant, selfy, hashtag on the #dotcons, disperse, donate, repeat. It pacifies rage by channelling it into metrics, and then sells those metrics back to us as success. It offers us vacuous victories made of smoke and mirrors: a viral post, a headline, a panel discussion.

But to put this simply, real power doesn’t care how you feel, it cares what you can disrupt. And right now, they know we can’t disrupt much, because power doesn’t fear signs or slogans, it fears logistics. We know this from history. The Viet Minh didn’t defeat the French colonial army with slogans. The IRA didn’t survive the British Empire through branding. The Zapatistas didn’t hold territory in Chiapas by waiting for permission. These movements did not rely on protest. They relied on operations. On strategy. On adaptability. On patience and planning.

What do we need, to shift from affective protest to effective resistance? This doesn’t mean abandoning public protest entirely, but it means recognizing what it is: a signal, not a structure. It’s the spark, not the engine. And too often, we mistake the spark for the fire.

So what does this shift look like? Stop chasing virality. Build networks that don’t rely on platforms owned by billionaires. Organize in ways that can’t be throttled or shadowbanned.
Don’t just protest; prototype. Create alternatives: cooperative farms, tool libraries, mesh networks, open media infrastructures (#OMN), community defence projects. Measure what matters. Track not followers or clicks, but mutual aid distributed, infrastructure built, people trained, tools replicated. Treat resistance like an ecosystem. Not wannabe famous (stupid)individuals shouting louder, but communities learning, adapting, and reproducing decentralized power.

In short, we need an operational culture, built not on outrage cycles but on daily commitment, iteration, and survival. This is prefigurative politics in action: we don’t beg the world to change, we build the new one inside the shell of the old. Yes, the current system will collapse. It is already collapsing. The question is no longer how to reform it, but at this stage, how to outlive it, and outgrow it.

This is where strategy matters, this is where affect must meet action. Because we aren’t here to perform resistance for an audience, we’re here to construct parallel systems in the cracks of empire. And that starts with understanding: protest alone is not enough. We must become ungovernable, not just in what we say – but in how we live.

#KISS

Get Out of the Money Economy – Rediscover the Gift Economy

If you want to live a more interesting alt life, the first most important step is to stop prioritizing “making money,” you need to step away from the money economy. This isn’t abstract theory, it’s a practical need to shift how we live, relate, and create. The best way to do this? Support and build the gift economy.

In the cash economy, value is transactional. Every act is priced, every moment potentially monetized. It trains us to hoard, to calculate, to protect, not to share. The money economy is the fuel of capitalism’s exploitative engines.

But the gift economy works differently. Here, value is rooted in trust, reciprocity, and relationship. You give what you can. You receive what you need. No receipts, no invoices, just care, commitment, and collective survival.

Oxford boater towpath screening, with food and communerty

Think food co-ops, free software, mutual aid groups, open media projects, towpath film screenings. Think #FOSS, #Indymedia, #OMN. Think friends fixing each other’s bikes. These are not fringe examples, they’re real, everyday signs of a parallel economy already alive.

The more time, skills, and energy we invest in the gift economy, the less dependent we become on extraction and scarcity. The less we need to “make money” just to survive. And the freer we are to imagine other futures. Build the gift economy, it’s a path to start to live again.

Toxic Positivity