Process is what gives legitimacy

This comes up again and again, in every horizontal movement that survives longer than a moment. Nobody gets to speak for a commons just because they feel inspired, loud, organised, or early. In healthy horizontal culture, legitimacy comes from process, not from individual initiative. This is as true for Rainbow as it is for #OMN, the #openweb, or any federated public space.

In “native” Rainbow culture, you don’t “call” a gathering on your own. Not because individuals are bad, but because individual authority is exactly what destroys non-hierarchical spaces. Gatherings only have legitimacy when they emerge from an open, inclusive council, a process that anyone affected can see, join, and influence.

People can scout locations, talk to locals, seed conversations, suggest ideas. All of that is valuable. None of it confers the right to represent the whole network. That boundary exists for a reason. Without it, you get hierarchy-by-default, confusion, misrepresentation, and reputation damage. When unilateral calls fail – and many do – it’s not just personal embarrassment, it poisons the commons. Outsiders can’t tell the difference between a real gathering and a made-up one, and trust erodes.

Council Is not a formality, it’s the safeguard, A real council isn’t a checkbox. It’s a space where people with lived experience of the culture can speak, be challenged, and listen. Traditionally this happens within existing gatherings, because that’s where diversity of voices actually exists.

Yes, in US gatherings, sometimes people talk about “three experienced people” as a minimum. That’s not an ideal. That’s an emergency fallback when the wider process has broken down. Three inexperienced people do not make a council. Not because newcomers are excluded, but because they don’t yet carry the collective memory of what works, what breaks, and who pays the price when mistakes are made.

This is basic #4opens thinking: open process, open participation, visible decision-making, accountability to the wider community. If you skip this, you’re not being radical – you’re being careless.

Inclusiveness is the test, the real measure of legitimacy is who was invited, a council that: meets in secret, is announced too late for others to attend, chooses inaccessible locations, excludes people due to personal conflict or political discomfort… is not legitimate. Full stop.

Horizontal culture cannot survive cliques, factions, or quiet exclusions. That’s how “informal power” replaces explicit hierarchy – the worst of both worlds. This isn’t about being nice. It’s about building processes that can hold disagreement without splitting. That’s what keeps a movement alive across decades.

Unilateral action breaks trust. Calling a gathering without a council, without visible support, without shared buy-in, isn’t just “doing your own thing.” It actively undermines the commons.

When fake or failed calls happen: travellers waste time and resources, local communities get confused or hostile, land managers lose trust, the whole network looks disorganised. The criticism here isn’t personal. It’s structural. Representation carries responsibility, and responsibility requires process.

Why this matters beyond Rainbow? This isn’t a niche cultural rule. It’s a universal horizontal principle. The same logic applies to: federated media (#OMN), grassroots tech, open governance (#OGB), the #fediverse, consensus-based organising everywhere

Openness beats secrecy.
Process beats personality.
Consensus beats authority.
Commons beat egos.

Council isn’t “governance theater.” It’s the cultural glue that replaces hierarchy. Without it, everything grassroots can very easily drift toward control, capture, and collapse. With it, you get continuity without leaders, coherence without command, and trust without enforcement.

That’s the path the #OMN is on. Not platforms, not figureheads, not “calls” from above. Just open process, visible legitimacy, and shared responsibility.

Normal is the mess of walking around in a toxic story and calling this common sense

Forty years of hard indoctrination doesn’t just fade away. It has to be dug up, held in our hands, recognised for what it is, and composted. If we don’t do this, we have no hope – none – of moving away from the accelerating mess that’s already killing millions and is on track to kill billions. Hobbes’ “nasty, brutish and short” isn’t a warning anymore; it’s a weather report.

Mainstream thinking feels normal because we’ve lived inside it for a generation and a half. But “normal” is a trick. Normal is the smell of rot covered with flowers. Normal is the daily worship of the #deathcult: competition as virtue, greed as destiny, extraction as progress, (stupid)individualism as freedom. Normal is the mess of walking around in a toxic story and calling it common sense.

A useful social activism path is to make this “common sense” story feel dirty, polluted, contaminated. Because it is, everything we touch – our institutions, our media, our language – is soaked in the residue of #neoliberalism. The indoctrination runs deep enough that we police ourselves long before any authority needs to step in. We repeat the slogans: There is no alternative. Don’t be unrealistic. Be responsible. Trust the experts. Let the market decide.

And that’s why we need to dig, turn over the dead soil so something else can grow. We need to break the spell and remind people that doubt, imagination, and collective action used to be normal too, before they were systematically stripped away.

Composting isn’t about purity or escape, it’s about transformation. Taking the poisoned narratives, breaking them down, mixing them with lived experience, adding the oxygen of open discourse, and letting something organic and grounded emerge. Something native, that belongs to us.

The #OMN, the #openweb, the #fediverse, grassroots media – these aren’t personal hobbies. They’re the tools we use to use, and can use agen to compost forty years of damage, to open spaces where new stories can sprout. To let people speak without being filtered through corporate interests and #NGO gatekeeping, rebuilding trust, messiness, solidarity, and actual democracy.

Because the mainstream isn’t just wrong – it’s killing us. And the longer we pretend it’s clean, the faster the rot spreads. Its past time to get our hands dirty, time to compost the #deathcult to grow something worth living in.

If you’re looking to do affective activism – activism that moves people, shifts culture, and builds real change – then you need to start from lived reality, not from academic distance.

The academic histories of our movements aren’t useless, but they are strongly second-hand and often shaped by #fashernista thinking: polished narratives, fashionable theory, safely detached accounts. They smooth over the mess, the conflict, the creativity, the failures, everything that actually matters when you’re trying to build power from below.

What we do need are more minority views from the people who were there. Not just the dominant stories, not just the tidy retellings, but the perspectives that expose the actual tensions inside our organising:

open vs closed

process vs control

serendipity vs bureaucracy

These are the real power that shaped our victories and our collapses. Take #indymedia. From my experience, it began open, horizontal, serendipitous – messy in all the productive ways. And it died closed, formal, bureaucratic – captured by the very forms it was created to resist. This is not a critique of individuals; it’s a plain, structural story. And it’s the kind of story we must use if we want to reboot anything today.

This is exactly why we have the #4opens: openness of code, data, process, and community. It’s a simple but powerful way to mediate these recurring problems. It keeps us grounded in transparency rather than personality, in shared pathways rather than gatekeeping, in public good rather than private control.

If any of this reads like a personal criticism, it isn’t. It’s a reminder that the future depends on honest memory, not sanitised mythology. To build the next wave – #OMN, #openweb, new grassroots media – we need our own histories, told by us, in our own messy, contradictory, living voices. That’s the compost the next movement grows from.

Why the #OMN works with #ActivityPub – And why we need a bridge to #p2p

Let’s look at this. #ActivityPub is not a product. It’s not even really a “protocol” in the narrow, rigid sense that vertical tech likes to imagine. ActivityPub is a shared vocabulary, a public language for moving meaning and connection across the #openweb. It gives you nouns and verbs, and the community defines the grammar through lived use.

This is why the #OMN works with ActivityPub, a metadata and meaning layer, not a platform, flows, not silos. ActivityPub is the widely deployed #4opens protocol that treats publishing as a flow, a conversation.

Unlike the more vertical stacks (#ATProto is a good example), ActivityPub doesn’t force a worldview. It doesn’t tell you, “this is how your network must be structured.” It doesn’t enforce hierarchy or lock you into one interpretation of identity, authority, or workflow. It’s a #KISS path – here’s a shared language, verbs for publishing and receiving, express objects, updates, relationships. The rest is up to the commons

This flexibility is exactly why the #OMN can become a part of this flow. ActivityPub, with #FAP process, is already evolving this way – not through top-down committees, but by developers and users defining new grammar for shared needs. Quote posts, permissions, object types, and many other extensions are emerging organically. This is horizontal protocol evolution, which aligns well with the #OMN path.

To mediate the #geekproblem trying to break this path. We need to say clearly why we don’t want an “ActivityPub 2.0”. A clean break is a vertical move, it reproduces the #techcurn cycle: throw away the compost, start another shiny stack, burn everything down every five years because fashion demands it. It’s the #fashernista mindset applied to protocols.

For the #OMN, we need continuity, evolving the commons, not abandoning it. ActivityPub works because it’s an accretion protocol, not a replacement protocol. We extend it, we add grammar, we build bridges, we compost the broken bits. This is the #nothingnew ethos: repair, adapt, extend, don’t rewrite reality every cycle.

This is fine up to a point, but still too much – Central points of failure – Which is fine for much of the #fediverse. But the #OMN isn’t only for well-resourced servers, it’s for change and challenge. Activists on the ground, communities without reliable hosting, people under surveillance, low-resource groups, offline-first publishing, pop-up networks, autonomous movements that cannot rely on central infrastructure.

For this layer, we need true #p2p protocols. This is where #DAT, #Hypercore, and similar tools matter – not as replacements, but as bridges. These are needed for resilient metadata flows, where stories, tags, and meaning travel across networks even when the networks are broken.

We need to understand why both matter, It’s because they do different things. ActivityPub gives us: wide distribution, discoverability, moderation structures, federation, slow-moving cultural infrastructure. We add to this what #p2p gives us: autonomy, resilience, offline survival, local-first publishing, anti-censorship pathways,

The #OMN’s job is to bridge these layers, same metadata vocabulary, same hashtag meaning system, same open processes. Two different transport layers depending on the need. Think of it like the compost metaphor: ActivityPub is the shared soil bed. #p2p is the mycelium running underneath, keeping it alive when storms hit.

This matters, we don’t want just another Fediverse, we don’t want just another p2p experiment. We need a living ecosystem that can: publish everywhere, survive disconnection, resist capture, remain open, remain public, remain messy, remain ours. ActivityPub gives us the public commons, p2p gives us the underground root network. The #OMN ties them together through shared metadata, hashtags, practices, and governance.

Compost, not silos, ecosystems, not empires. Federation on the surface, peer-to-peer underneath. This is the #OMN path.

Manifesto for the Hashtag Commons

Outreach for the #OMN path, for the past year, the hashtag story has taken shape, not as branding, not as marketing, but as a shared language for navigating the mess we’re in. Each tag is compost: lived experience, memory of struggle, lessons from broken movements, glimpses of collective futures. Together they form a map of where we have been and the ground we are trying to rebuild.

This story is now done enough to act as a tool: a framework that connects all the projects, all the struggles, all the seeds of the #openweb still alive beneath the concrete of the #dotcons. It is the cultural layer that makes the technical layer possible.

But culture alone doesn’t run servers. Ideas alone don’t federate. And stories alone don’t build the future. We are at the point where the #OMN needs hands, skills, and messy collaboration to move from compost to sprouts.

Why this matters now, the last decades have been dominated by #stupidindividualism, a value system that believes progress comes from isolated actors, personal brands, and vertical structures. It produced a brittle world where resilience is outsourced, where every commons is pushed to monetise, and where the #deathcult logic of extraction is treated as “normal.”

Our work – the hashtag ecosystem, the #4opens, the #OGB, the #OMN – is a counter-current. Not a product, not an app, not a platform chasing hype cycles, it is a path toward:

Public-first networks

Permissionless publishing

Collective governance

Local autonomy woven into global flows

This isn’t nostalgia, it’s urgently needed #KISS survival. If we do not rebuild horizontal infrastructure now, the coming decades of #climatechaos will be shaped entirely by closed systems, proprietary protocols, and “solutions” that cannot be questioned.

The Hashtag Story as outreach tool, the hashtag system functions as a shared vocabulary, a way for people to step into the conversation without needing insider history.

#stupidindividualism, #openweb, #deathcult, #climatechaos, #OMN, #OGB, #4opens, #techshit, #nothingnew. These are not memes, they’re a lexicon for agency. The next phase is to combine this cultural layer with working codebases. Once one of the #OMN implementations is stable, the hashtag-combination tools will become transformative. They allow:

networked meaning-making

distributed editorial processes

peer governance

cross-platform, public-first publishing

local instances that connect into a wider commons without central control

This is the infrastructure the last generation of movements never had. What is blocking? People and Resources, yes, the same old story, funding and people. Here in Oxford, the search for a tech crew hasn’t turned up much yet. The bigger truth is that many potential contributors are scattered, burnt out, or trapped inside the #dotcons economy where every hour of labour must be monetised.

But there are people out there who still believe in the commons. People who want to build rather than brand. People who understand that open infrastructure is not optional.

This manifesto is an invitation to those people. If you want to #KISS work on:

federated, non-corporate publishing

governance without gatekeepers

open metadata and community sorting

tools that strengthen movements instead of extracting from them

infrastructures that grow like ecosystems rather than like empires

Then the #OMN path is open, we are not looking for heroes, we are looking for collaborators,
for people who can work in the open, for people who understand that messy is healthy, for people who know that compost is more valuable than hype.

If that’s you, step forward. Bring code, or time, or testing, or critique, or even just curiosity. The groundwork is laid, hashtags are seeded, what we need now is the crew to grow the next layer.

Let’s build the commons. Let’s reboot the #openweb. Let’s make the #OMN real.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=hashtag+story

We are not suffering from a shortage of “great leaders”

What we are suffering from a shortage of collective pathways. The crisis we are walking into isn’t caused by a lack of charisma or vision at the top. It’s caused by the cultural trap we’ve built around individual solutions to systemic problems. #stupidindividualism – the obsession with personal leaders, personal brands, personal genius – is going to kill millions and displace billions over the next 20 years. Not because individuals are inherently harmful, but because individualism is the wrong tool for a collapsing world.

Vertical thinking can’t see horizontal realities. If your whole value system is built around leaders, ranks, and “key figures,” you will be blind to the commons, to networks, to peer processes, to messy collective agency. And this blindness is not neutral, it accelerates #climatechaos, feeds the #deathcult, and locks us into the same extractive paths that got us here in the first place.

The way forward isn’t another charismatic savior or another “hero innovator.” What we need is to balance collective pathways built from the ground up. Any working future needs:

Networks, not heroes. Because no single person can hold the complexity ahead.

Practices, not brands. Because technique and culture outlast personalities.

Open processes, not closed hierarchies. Because transparency is the only antidote to captured systems.

Shared governance, not managed optics. Because appearance won’t save us, but participation might.

Messy, compostable infrastructures, not shiny hype machines. Because real change grows from what we renew, reuse, and reimagine, not what we market.

This thinking points toward the #OMN, not as a product, not as a platform, not as “the next big thing,” but as a path. A way of organising, publishing, coordinating, and governing that is native to the horizontal world we actually live in. A way to compost the #techshit and grow something more real.

We don’t need better leaders, we need better collectives, we need spaces where the horizontal becomes visible again. And we need them now.

The #mainstreaming has a crap story, they say that the crisis of communication – the noise, the chaos, the misinformation, the anxiety – can only be solved by “returning to trusted sources.”
They will argue that decentralized media is dangerous, that the “wild internet” must be cleaned up, that only vetted, official voices should have reach.

They will say that decentralized paths, all horizontal spaces are inevitably viral cesspools, and that our #openweb native podcasts, newsletters, open blogs, fedi servers are similer unregulated contamination. The growing fascism, in the end, will push that non-institutional voices are a threat to public order. That public conversation must be brought back under professional management, them.

The line will be simple: “Let the experts speak. Everyone else, sit down.” This is the predictable response of a broken society that lost control of its own narratives. And yes, they are right about one thing, that Big Tech is a sewer. The #dotcons profit from rage, division, algorithmic sewage, and emotional manipulation. Their business model is engineered disinformation. They are the factories of mess we live in.

But the establishment’s mistake, or more accurately, their strategic convenient lie, is pretending we, the #openweb, are the same, we are not. The #fediverse is not Facebook, Podcasts are not TikTok, Blogs and newsletters are not X, the #openweb is not #AlgoMedia.

We are: human-scale, chronological, transparent, open-process, community governed, non-addictive, non-manipulative. Decentralized media is not chaos – it is plurality. The messy public – not the polished elitists – speaking in many voices.

The establishment wants a return to vertical media because they cannot see horizontal people. Their value system literally blinds them. They believe discourse must be orderly, top-down, fact-checked by institutions that have long since been captured by the #deathcult of capital and careerism.

The problem is not that too many people speak, the problem is that too few people have been allowed to listen. The #OMN is the seedling of the opposite vision, many small voices, widely distributed, human editorial networks, community amplification and messy compostable infrastructure. The fedi, podcasts, blogs, newsletters – these are not the disease. They are the immune system emerging in response to the disease.

The establishment sees disorder, we see a rewilding,

They see danger, we see a necessary correction.

They see fragmentation, we see a path back to collective agency.

Not only that, but the current #mainstreaming are desperate to recentralize the narrative because decentralization breaks their #deathcult monopole on truth, framing, and attention. The people do not need saving from themselves, they need saving from the system that hijacked their voices. They need a native path that is open, messy, federated, to push compostable public media, where trust is earned through transparency, not authority.

#KISS

The Bloody Days of Genoa

The Genoa G8 Summit protests, held from July 18 to 22, 2001, were a turning point in the global justice movement. More than 200,000 people converged on the medieval port city to block the summit and challenge the concentrated power of the world’s richest nations. A gathering of the #deathcult ideology, grinding the planet into dust for profit.

For many of us, the G8 represented everything wrong with the world: an unelected body shaping economic and social policy for billions without legitimacy, accountability, or consent. We travelled to Genoa not as isolated activists but as a living ecosystem of movements, anarchists, trade unionists, farmers, climate campaigners, media collectives, migrants’ rights groups, students, pacifists, the lot. We were there to resist and to build alternatives in the cracks.

Arriving in a besieged city, Genoa a few days before the demonstrations to help set up the Media Centre, for grassroots reporting. Genoa, though, felt nothing like a holiday town. Police were everywhere. Riot vans on street corners. Helicopters thudding overhead. The convergence centre was being built on the beach; just 100 yards away from the stadium, where police forces were massing in their thousands. Walking around felt like moving inside a tightening fist.

We slept in the camper van that first night, tucked beside a half-built marquee. At dawn, we joined the organisers at the Diaz school, the building that housed both the Genoa Social Forum and the Media Centre.

We requisition two PCs from other rooms, installed video editing softwer, and turned them into the only two shared editing stations in the building. One was upgraded with a new hard drive and FireWire card for DV footage, not that it mattered, because it broke on day two and never recovered. The analogue capture system we had brought did most of the work that went online.

On one of our first reporting trips, filming outside the police barracks beside the convergence centre, we were detained by undercover cops. More arrived. Then more. Ten or twelve by the end. They demanded our tapes. I refused. They checked our documents, questioned us for hours, and released us without charge. I secretly filmed some of them; two would resurface later outside the IMC on the night of the raid.

Driving around the city to document the expanding “red zone” – the militarised area blocking off the summit – we were detained twice more. Civil rights meant nothing here. The police behaved like a sovereign power unto themselves. That Orwellian twinge – the sense that you are inside a lawless machine – grew stronger every day.

When the City Turned Red. Then one protester, Carlo Giuliani, was shot dead by police. Fear rippled across the city. The IMC became a space threaded with arguments about what to do. People drifted away, hour by hour, some deciding the risks were too great. By midnight the centre had half emptied.

Then the screams came: “THE POLICE ARE COMING!”

Looking out the window, I saw nothing at first. Panic surged anyway, people barricading doors, grabbing bags, racing up staircases. Marion moved the archive tapes to the hiding place I’d scouted earlier: the water tower on the roof.

From the rooftop I filmed carabinieri smashing into the building next door, the Diaz Pertini school, with vans and sledgehammers. Chairs were used to break windows. Tables became battering rams. It was happening fast, shockingly fast. Then I saw them entering our stairwell.

The Diaz Raid: Running for Our Lives. I headed downstairs to check if the Media Centre itself was being stormed. Turning the stairwell corner, I came face-to-face with a fully armoured carabiniere charging upward, truncheon raised, panting with adrenaline. I spun and bolted. Two flights up, shouting, “They’re in the building!” I sprinted to the roof and slipped into the tower.

Inside the darkness, I whispered for Marion. No answer. I crept through the corridor of water tanks, lit only by the IR beam from my camera. Finally a small, terrified voice: “Turn the light off.” She had hidden behind the last tank, clutching tapes and equipment.

For hours, three, maybe four, we lay silent as the helicopter’s spotlight swept the windows. Police boots thudded across the roof. Below us, the city echoed with screams, crashes, and the chanted word “ASSASSINI.”

When the helicopter finally left, we emerged. The rooftop was scattered with stunned survivors. Downstairs, the destruction was total. Computers smashed. Hard drives ripped out. Doors hanging loose. The walls of the Diaz school across the street were painted with blood. Skin and hair stuck to corners. Piles of clothing soaked red. People moving like ghosts.

The Carabinieri had left their calling card.

What happened inside that school, was not policing. It was torture, humiliation, and fascist ritual. Ninety-three sleeping demonstrators were beaten so badly that the floors resembled a slaughterhouse. People hiding under tables or sleeping in bags were clubbed unconscious. A 65-year-old woman’s arm was broken. One student needed surgery for brain bleeding. Others had their teeth kicked out. One officer cut clumps of hair from victims as trophies.

Those who survived were taken to Bolzaneto detention centre, where the abuse continued: beatings, stress positions, pepper spray, threats of rape, and forced chants of “Viva il Duce!” and “Viva Pinochet!” A systematic, organised brutality. This wasn’t loss of control, it was ideology.

Aftermath: Truth in the Ruins. The Italian state tried to bury it all. But survivors, lawyers, journalists, and prosecutors fought for years. The European Court of Human Rights eventually ruled that Italy had committed grave human rights violations. But almost none of the officers served jail time. Politicians escaped entirely.

The police weren’t out of control. They were following a logic, the logic of protecting eliteists power against democratic dissent. The logic of the #deathcult. The logic that treats people as obstacles, not citizens. Genoa showed the world what happens when movements gain too much momentum: the mask drops.

And still, in that chaos, seeds were planted – #indymedia, #OMN, the global justice movement, the early #openweb – messy, hopeful, compost for future uprisings.

Diaz up in the water tower

The Power of Film

The Godfather films, aren’t only stories about criminals, they’re stories about the world we live in: hierarchy pretending to be community, patriarchy pretending to be protection, capitalism pretending to be freedom, politicians pretending to be legitimate, family pretending to be love. It’s the #deathcult mythos in cinematic form.

They’re parables about how hierarchy rots everything it touches. Coppola and Puzo create a world where the mafia isn’t an aberration but a mirror of #mainstreaming power: patriarchal families, capitalist accumulation, politicians in pockets, and a state captured by private interests. It’s #deathcult logic wrapped in myth.

It opens not with the fake glamour of today’s action films, with none of the politically correct obscuring, but with real working people doing real life, it’s a view outside the current post truth polished mess. It’s about what’s behind the shiny surface blindness, you watch this film today to experience filmmaking and politics, like meany older films, the pacing is slow. Our attention spans are broken, good to keep this in your mind as you learn to see anew this ethnography of a pastime.

The Corleones aren’t only monsters from the shadows; they’re the real face of American power with the mask removed. Vito Corleone is an older, more honest version of the #neoliberal billionaire who buys judges today. The story’s “crime families” are stand-ins for competing capitalist blocks. The story is a metaphor for how power protects itself, how legitimacy is a costume, and how the violence of the system, hides behind talk of “family,” “business,” “respect,” and “tradition.”

The first two films critique the world we live in, a family built on the same contradictions that tear it apart. Quotes:

“It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.”
→ the neoliberal worldview: harm without responsibility.

“I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
→ the essence of capitalist coercion: “choice” backed by threat.

“We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.”
→ capitalism’s real goal: monopoly masked as freedom.

“Just when I thought I was out…”
→ no exit from systems built on domination.

The films are showing us the mythology of the mainstreaming #deathcult. America as Mafia, Mafia as America.

The first film opens with a small man being crushed by the system: a father whose daughter is brutalized, and the courts shrug. This is how neoliberalism works: public services are defunded, fail, people are pushed into private “solutions.” Justice outsourced to a Don is no different from healthcare outsourced to a corporation: both sell what should be a right. Vito’s “friendship” is the same as corporate “philanthropy”, a mask over structural violence.

The “family” keeps up appearances – the bourgeoisie’s favourite hobby – while patriarchal rot devours everyone inside. Connie is beaten by Carlo, but the family shrugs because patriarchal norms demand they stay out of a “private matter.” The same system that fetishizes “protecting our women” abandons them whenever protection would inconvenience male hierarchy. It’s about too much control and not enough care.

Competition, crises, violence – the capitalist cycle – it is useful to see the mythology in #KISS terms, the Five Families aren’t criminals; they’re competing capitalist firms. Their war is a stand-in for economic crises. Clemenza even says these things happen “every ten years,” which is basically the capitalist business cycle.

The Tattaglias and Barzinis pushing heroin aren’t “more evil”, they’re the next stage of capitalism’s expansion, accumulation demanding new markets. Violence is “nothing personal,” which is how every predatory corporation sees the world.

Michael, capitalism’s golden child, was meant to be “legitimate” – a senator, a governor. A respectable frontman to maintain the illusion. Instead, he becomes the perfect neoliberal mess: calm, disciplined, efficient, emotionally repressed, willing to destroy anyone to maintain order. He is the patriarchal son weaponized. The obvious patriarchy flowing through the films is a useful reminder for some and insight for meany about what happens behind closed doors in the current hard right with their calling for “family values”.

By the end of the first film, when he wipes out all rivals while standing in a church professing faith, we see the metaphor: authoritarian capitalism, patriarchal religion, and state legitimacy all fused together. He “renounces Satan” while becoming him, the system itself.

Part II, sharpens this critique. We see young Vito’s rise in a world where feudalism is giving way to capitalism, one hierarchy composting into another. He kills Don Fanucci (feudal power) so he can build Genco Olive Oil (capitalist power). Same structure, new branding.

Meanwhile, Michael, the more matured form of this system, expands the empire into Nevada, New York, Miami, Sicily, Cuba. It’s the globalisation arc. And like all global empires, it’s built on betrayal: Fredo’s betrayal (internal collapse), Kay’s rejection (patriarchal fragility exposed), Michael’s violence against his own (self-destruction inherent in all hierarchical systems). By killing Fredo “for the family,” Michael destroys the family. Capitalism works the same way: protecting profit destroys society.

And the ending is the #techcurn lesson: systems built on secrecy, power, and control always collapse inward, devouring the people they claim to protect. Michael Corleone is neoliberalism in human form. Vito is the earlier, “nicer” version of the same system. And the people around them? Compost.

The Cuba revolution is the one moment where the system cracks – the #openweb moment of the film – where people try to reclaim the commons, break the hierarchy, stop being pawns.

On the subject of filmmaking, a lot of the films’ technics now look every day, this is not because they are, they are brilliant, it’s because every film for the last 50 years has coped them and thus diluted their shine with mediacy. Open your eyes, afresh, watch the films, you are seeing the invention of cinema. When you are used to a lifetime of derivative drivel.

The History of visionOntv: What We Built, What We Lost, and Why It Matters Again

Looking back at the old TubeMogul stats – the archived page from 2011 – I had a jolt:
18 million verified views, and when you added the torrent distribution, RSS syndication, video CDROM redistribution, and all the edge-case channels we seeded into, the total was closer to 34 million views. These were big numbers back then.

All grassroots, all #KISS, all built on the early #openweb ethos, that number matters, not for vanity, rather, it showed proof-of-work for what a truly decentralized media network could do before the #dotcons consolidated their grip.

People forget this now, but #visionOntv was one of the earliest real-world demonstrations of the idea behind what we have now with the #Fediverse, years before the word existed:

distributed hosting

open content flows

creative commons

no algorithmic manipulation

human curation

peer-to-peer distribution

training and empowerment as core paths

This wasn’t theory, it was practice, in the era just before the enclosure of the Web took hold. The original vision – visionOntv’s mission statement from back then – looking at it now through the Web Archive – still works:

“Are you feeling dejected and bored? Does mainstream media make you feel ill? Then get off your ass…” This wasn’t branding, it was the cultural tone of a time when people still believed the internet could change things, and it genuinely did. visionOntv was a platform, seed for a network, built around a simple idea: video for social change, delivered in formats normal people could actually use.

We were deliberately designing for the “lean-in / lean-out” model before UX people had the words for it. You could sit back and watch it as TV. Or you could click deeper, link up to the grassroots campaigns behind the stories, jump straight into action.

The point was always outreach, always getting beyond the activist bubble, aways trying to plant seeds of agency in ordinary people, that “compost” metaphor we still use today. Quality, not chaos, visionOntv was not open-publishing, we had a quality threshold, we mentored people into producing work that worked, visually, politically, narratively, not gatekeeping, but gardening.

This is something the #openweb forgot: freedom isn’t the same as noise. We were trying to hold onto a craft tradition inside a political one. Tools, Training, and #4opens. We pushed #FOSS open source production tools as far as they could go, but we weren’t dogmatic. If a corporate tool was necessary for outreach, we used it. The guiding star was always:

Does this help media democracy grow?
Does this empower real people?
Does this keep the compost fertile?

And because we distributed everything in Creative Commons non-commercial, people everywhere could download, remix, project in their communities, hand out self copied video CDs to run their own screenings. One broadband connection could feed a whole neighbourhood. That was media democracy. Again: this was proto-Fediverse thinking before the word existed, this was a people’s broadcasting network built on the #4opens.

What happened, the #dotcons consolidated – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter – and sucked the air out of open distribution. We were publishing into a storm of #enshittification before the word was coined. And of course we tried to ride the wave, keep the doors open, keep the channels alive. But the gravity of centralized platforms crushed the ecology, distribution dried up.

The “lean-in/lean-out” mechanism was rendered obsolete by the algorithmic feed. The early #P2P ecosystems were squeezed by copyright paranoia and corporate capture. It wasn’t that visionOntv failed, the Web changed around it, in the same way soil ecology collapses when a monoculture plantation takes over.

The #Peertube Era That… Almost Happened. When the #Fediverse bloomed, we did the obvious thing: we pushed all the video archives, feeds, and channels onto PeerTube. It was the correct move, and we were there early. But PeerTube was young, fragile, underfunded, underhyped. And unlike the massive #dotcons, decentralized tech requires community support to stay alive.

We didn’t get that support, so the server went dark. And now the whole archive – all that history, all that outreach, all the proof-of-work – sits offline. This isn’t a guilt trip, it’s a call-out to the people who care about the #openweb: Come on, folks, let’s bring visionOntv back https://opencollective.com/open-media-network/projects/visionontv

The internet itself isn’t the problem

Let’s be clear: the internet itself isn’t the problem. We knew how to build decentralised, humane, empowering networks long before the #dotcons turned everything into a behavioural extraction machine. The original internet – messy, permissionless, #4opens by default – can’t addict you. It doesn’t care. It doesn’t optimise. It just connects.

What addicts you are, the enclosure layers built on top of the internet. The sticky walls. The velvet handcuffs. The slick, dopamine-juiced engagement loops that the #dotcons built precisely because an open commons is unprofitable to their shareholders.

The tragedy is that we’ve let that thin, commercial crust redefine what people think the internet is. And because people can’t see the difference anymore, they blame “technology” or “the internet” instead of the actual problem, #dotcons corporate capture of communications.

This misframing is not an accident. It’s a political success for Silicon Valley. We do need to call out this #techshit, the compost layer we need to break down and return to the soil, but don’t mistake it for the internet. One is a commons. The other is a shopping mall with mirrors.

And this matters, because if we accept the framing that the entire internet is toxic, addictive, or inherently harmful, we give up the ground needed to fight for a public-first, #openweb future. We surrender the commons to the #dotcons by default. It’s classic #deathcult logic: destroy the shared world, declare it unfixable, then sell the gated alternative.

The #KISS path is still there, just harder to see under the sludge: simple tools, open protocols, people over platforms, and messy, real community instead of “curated engagement.” Things grow in compost. Even #techshit. Especially #techshit.

The task now is helping people tell the difference between the internet and the systems designed to trap them, and then getting them out into the open air again.

Oxford radical history

The scent of damp soil and half-forgotten futures, a version that flow, a sourcebook for day-to-day life and activism from a time when the local living alternatives were not theory but everyday life, in a small English town https://oxford.indymedia.org.uk/ It’s an archive now, a time capsule you can wander through. If this current generation is looking for inspiration, I’d suggest starting at the beginning, the last few years of the site weren’t exactly its golden hour.

When I went back recently and found this page, I stumbled across two posts from my younger self, still humming with the raw, chaotic energy of those years. A small echo across time.

Oxford #Indymedia is a local example of how utopian and dystopian currents flow, how hope and burnout danced around each other like quarrelling siblings. It shows how people lived alternatives rather than only theorising, how the #openweb wasn’t a dream but a sweaty, meeting-filled, joyful, improvisational practice. If you want to dig deeper into the era, my own site is here: http://hamishcampbell.com

And for the moving images, the pixelated documents of that strange, fertile period, go rummaging in what remains of these vaults. Sort by oldest to get the proper archaeology:

There’s a lot there, though less from Oxford, mostly happened pre #dotcons, where you can’t find videos. The compost, the mistakes, the stubborn courage, the feeling that another world wasn’t just possible but already partially assembled in basements, squats, boats, and borrowed offices.

Maybe someone will pick up a thread and weave something fresh with it. That’s the hope.

https://unite.openworlds.info/indymedia/indymedia-reboot

“We, we, we,” they say – but who chooses the “we”?

Trump and Putin are the figureheads of the #deathcult and 3ed rate people like Staner are puppets. The #nastyfew, mostly invisible in the smoke and mirrors of #mainstreaming media, are the ones who push the “we”. And they also invest in a part of our “progressive” paths, always much less affective than they need to be, let’s look at this from the latest #AI tech the #dotcons and more importantly our own #NGO crew.

The core of the #NGO mess: they claim to represent everyone, while foreclosing every other possibility. “We, we, we,” they say – but who chooses the “we”? Meanwhile, the parasite class in tech has spent twenty years destroying the social fabric of the internet, turning everything into grift, extraction, and precarious dependence. There is every chance that this new wave of #AI/#NGO/#dotcons fusion will be just more mess for us to compost.

As I said, let’s look at these people who are in bed with the #dotcons, sucking at the teat (LINK) of the #nastyfew. It should be easy to see, at best they’re a warm blanket, precisely when we need a shovel. They always smother real change and real challenge while claiming to “scale impact.” and other buzzwords.

Working within the system and working outside it both have effects – and yes, we need to balance these paths. But let’s be honest: the “inside” path is 98% parasites, and the “outside” path is full of fashionistas hiding insider routes behind radical posturing. So the balance point isn’t where we think it is. It has to be pushed far, far back from the centre we’ve been trained to accept.

Yes, there is some value in their affective progressive-tech narratives, but it is a tiny force against the power of global capital. They love the idea of the “bridging node,” the mythical middle ground where nothing is actually bridged and nothing is actually changed. Soft, persuasive, endlessly consulting, the #NGO path is a warm blanket to snugal when you should be getting up to work. It comforts, it reassures, and it is collectively ineffective. In the end, that blanket is all they have to offer: a feeling, not a transformation.

And then there’s all the #AI, most of it #techshit witch we need to be clear, is not intelligence, just more civic control in the hands of the #nastyfew. LLMs, image recognition, all of it: tools with some utility, but zero real intelligence. What they do enable is more vertical power, refined manipulation, more subtle control, more extraction of attention, behaviour, and labour through the constantly spreading #dotcons.

With our ongoing #openweb reboot we need a real democratic steering wheel again, actual power to change, not ONLY warm blankets and #PR funding. This is why the #OMN, the #4opens, and the slow work of composting matter. Because every other path on offer right now leads straight back to the same smothering, stagnant centre – the place where nothing grows.

#OMN

The Voyage of the Volga: The Wager

INT. THE OXFORD UNION – EVENING

A worn wooden interior lined with old photos and leather books. The clock above the bar ticks with naval precision. A few posh students sip pints and argue about lectures. Rain patters against the windows.

PRESENT:

HAMISH CAMPBELL, calm, steady, with a glint of wild vision behind measured words.

STUART, a skeptical undergraduate engineer.

RALPH, an economic prof who’s seen too much red tape.

FLANAGAN, a wannabe cryptocurrency trader with a cynical grin.

SULLIVAN, a journalist looking for a story.

DAN, a scruffy but sharp mechanic, quietly nursing a mug of tea.

STUART
(holding up a chart)
Hamish, you’ve lost it this time. You can’t sail to Iran on an inland route. Europe isn’t a bathtub, you know.

HAMISH
(flatly)
You can, if you know the canals. London to the Baltic Sea, then down the Volga—across to the Caspian. From there, it’s a short hop to Iran.

FLANAGAN
(snickers)
That’s not a voyage, that’s a labyrinth. Half those waterways are closed, half forgotten.

RALPH
And the tugboat? You’re taking that scruffy old thing—what’s it called?

HAMISH
(smiles faintly)
The Volga.

SULLIVAN
You named the boat after the river you’re trying to conquer. Poetic—but absurd.

HAMISH
It’s not absurd. The inland waterways are the old arteries of Europe. We’ve just forgotten how to use them.

STUART
You really think you can make it all the way to Iran by river and canal?

HAMISH
Yes. And I’ll prove it.

A silence falls. Rain grows heavier against the windows.

FLANAGAN
Prove it how? A blog post? A film? Another myth for your #openweb friends?

HAMISH
(smiling thinly)
A patron campaign.

STUART
A wager? What are we betting on?

HAMISH
That I can make the voyage. No flashy corporate sponsorship. No closed tech. Just the tugboat Volga, open charts, and Dan here.

Dan looks up, startled, tea half-spilled.

DAN
Wait—me?

HAMISH
You said you wanted a break from working life. This is it.

SULLIVAN
You’re both mad. I’ll sign up for the Patreon—what—five hundred pounds says you won’t get past the Keal canal.

FLANAGAN
Make it a thousand to reach the Helsinki.

STUART
(laughing)
And ten thousand if you actually touch Iranian soil!

Hamish calmly pulls a slim laptop from his backpack and slides it across the table.

HAMISH
Let’s make the pledges official.

They type, close the laptop, and stands, buttoning his jacket.

HAMISH (CONT’D)
The river doesn’t care about politics or doubt. It just flows. All we have to do is follow it.

He checks the clock — 8:45 p.m.

HAMISH (CONT’D)
Come on, Dan. The tide’s waiting in London. Time to move.

EXT. IFFLEY LOCK – NIGHT

The tugboat Volga rocks gently under the amber glow of the Isis Farmhouse lights. Ducks gather along the bank. Rain glistens on the solar panels. Dan loads supplies while Hamish inspects the digital charts.

DAN
You really think this old tub can make it to Iran?

HAMISH
If it can float, it can travel. Trust the river, not the chattering #dotcons online.

He starts the engine. The tug hums to life.

HAMISH
Next stop—the North Sea. Then the world’s forgotten backwaters.

They push off into the mist as Oxford recedes behind them, the city lights reflecting faintly on the black water.

FADE OUT.

TITLE CARD:
“The Voyage of the Volga has begun.”

#boatingeurope