Getting through this era of collapse with anything humane intact

The discussions on sovereignty at #NGIForum2025 make me wonder: what year are we in? It’s as if we’re rebooting grassroots conversations we’ve had for decades – but without the mess, memory, or movement that gave them meaning in the first place.

A breath of clarity came from @renchap, who said it plainly:

We need to focus our efforts on funding and supporting public value network infrastructure… THAT CANNOT BE BOUGHT. 💪

Absolutely. If that idea resonates with you, try starting with the #4opens – a pragmatic path to build tech with real accountability and openness. It’s not a utopia, it’s a filter designed to push out 95% of the #techshit we’re constantly drowning in. The rest? That’s the work: compromise, community, governance.

For those curious about mapping this stuff, I appreciate the attempt to formalize governance components of digital commons here: https://commons.mattischneider.fr/2-constituants It’s useful, but my take? Still not messy enough to reflect how real-world horizontal projects actually work. As the site rightly says:

“If you already have experience in operating commons, you or your organisation will probably have specific practices that are more appropriate to your context.”

Exactly, why context matters, and why real commons need trust-based governance, not just metrics and diagrams. Let’s remember:

Tools are only useful if people use them.
And that’s our real problem right now.

Take this audience question as a clear example: What should we do when a US company acquires an EU one – like Cisco buying Slido? It hits the core issue:

Centralized, vertical control is always the endgame of VC funding and the mainstream tech stack.

What’s the mainstream response? Push more AI. Push more “innovation.” Push more #stupidindividualism. This story is heavily funded and constantly amplified. Why? Because it keeps us distracted, divided, and demobilized. We need to compost this garbage.

Let’s stop pretending #opensource is the goal. It’s only useful if it lives in common infrastructure, owned and governed collectively, with embedded solidarity, not slogans. Yes, someone pointed out that:

"Open source licensing permits continued operation of the software with an EU provider."

That’s technically true, but in practice, how many such transitions actually happen? How many of these tools become hollowed-out ghost projects after the buyout? We need the EU to fund #4opens #FOSS and commons-native projects directly, not startups chasing exit strategies.

And yes, I’ll be blunt here:

There’s likely a whole class of people who should be prosecuted for fraud.

Because the current “innovation” circuit is knowingly wasting public money on private gain under “our” banner of openness. It’s a con. A parasitic class living off the #countercultures they parasitise. So let’s call this out, not to “disrupt” for disruption’s sake, but to open up space for what actually matters:

Native projects with shared roots in code, care, and community.
Activism that isn’t tacked on for #PR, but central to the infrastructure itself.
Horizontal governance that embraces mess, rather than paving over it.

We don’t need more products, we don’t need more platforms, we don’t need more panels pushing safe #neoliberal “common sense.” What we do need is to build and protect infrastructure that can’t be bought, captured, or silenced. Because that’s the only way we’re getting through this era of collapse with anything humane intact.

#NGIForum #NGIForum25 #4opens #OMN #openweb #techshit #commonsnotplatforms #mutualaid #FOSS #trustnotcontrol #liberalcapture #activismtech #geekproblem

Oxford: Going with The Flow

NGIFORUM2025 is timidly touching sense

It’s good to see events like #NGIFORUM2025 as it’s trying to be on the path of the #Fediverse and the wider #openweb reboot which are real forces for social good, messy, hopeful, and grounded in decades of grassroots digital culture, which we do need to support. BUT we also need to speak honestly, as these spaces are not healthy by default.

Too often, they are co-opted by #NGO and institutional actors who bring with them a dangerous kind of “common sense”, what I’ve long described as the parasite class. We see this clearly at #NGIFORUM and similar #NGO events. Despite the energy and good intentions, the dominant framing is stuck in a narrow, #neoliberal logic:

More funding for shiny #techfixes.
Token gestures to social issues.
Endless discussion about scalability, compliance, branding, and “the market.”
Panels where “on-topic” needs reality-checking and “off-topic” is often the path to sense.

This is not the #openweb native path, and what we need is more shovels and composting, to grow the real grassroots native paths, with open projects from the messy soil of lived social experience. Not more polished “innovation theatre.” And crucially: we need to bring activism back into these spaces – not as token #fashernista crap, but as lived, rooted practice. We need to embed activist tech into the core of these events, not leave it in the hallway as is the current norm.

Because let’s be honest, too much of what’s being showcased is just more #techshit to compost. Take the role of NGI funding (Next Generation Internet): It could be a powerful tool to fund the future of a people-powered web. But right now? It’s structured to reward isolated hard tech with narrow deliverables, and punish anything messy, social, or disruptive. That’s upside-down.

The development side of open-source should be anti-commercial – in its process, not necessarily in its usage. That means public funding should support the huge social layer that keeps FOSS and #openweb projects alive:

Community organising.
UX design from lived needs, not compliance charts.
Onboarding and trust-building.
Accessibility work.
Documenting process for reuse and remix.

But currently these parts are entirely unfunded, and that is pushing us into the arms of the parasite class’s of all types. We are walking backward into the future, again, projects without people, users, and support are dead projects. No matter how elegant the codebase is.

One thing that the event brings up is that we need to shift policy, national governments and #EU to actively intervene in the monopolies running the current internet. Both mobile and fixed-line networks need to be opened up to allow for grassroots, peer-to-peer, and local hosting paths to flourish. The current centralised infrastructure is a block to the native #openweb, and we can’t “build better” on broken foundations.

The also needs to be a cultural shift, to unblock the #geekproblem. This is not a call-out – it’s a call-in. The feedback is there, i’ve personally been working on this issue for over a decade, what we’ve seen is a cycle: Working in a small way… failing in a big way… repeating.

It’s not personal, it is structural. And we can do better, if we compost the fear of doing things differently. A practical example, we need more points that are currently deemed “off-topic.”
Because what’s “on-topic” in these spaces is just branding and polite theatre. And that’s exactly how the #dotcons rose to dominance in the first place.

We are at risk of simply recreating their culture in softer tones. Let’s not do that. Let’s take a breath and reflect on what we’re actually building, it’s not a rhetorical question. This is not abstract.

Because if we keep defaulting to #neoliberal “common sense,” if we ignore the reality of climate collapse, digital authoritarianism, and infrastructure lock-in, then we’re just dancing around the edges of a very real #deathcult.

Let’s do the real work, let’s dig, plant, compost, and build trust. Let’s reclaim the tools and shape the #openweb around care, not control. Because anything less? It is just another empty panel on a sinking ship.

“All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.”
— Oscar Wilde

#Fediverse #OMN #4opens #commonsnotplatforms #mutualaid #socialroots #trustnotcontrol #KISS #NGIFORUM2025 #NGIforum #nlnet

The future depends on us using the power we still have

The #openweb holds a quiet kind of power – messy, distributed, human. But I keep wondering: are people now too afraid to use that power? The sad truth is, many always were. Power isn’t something most of us are raised to understand, let alone wield collectively. For decades, we’ve been taught to outsource it, to institutions, to markets, to influencers. But the cracks are everywhere now, and there’s no more room to pretend.

What we’re facing isn’t theoretical, the hard right is not just consolidating power, they’re weaponizing it. They’ve successfully atomized progressive movements, through culture wars, #AI manipulation, and economic precarity, they’ve made sure many can’t even think collectively, let alone act.

And where is this leading? Let’s be blunt. They are on track to kill billions of people and vast swathes of nature over the next 100 years. This isn’t hyperbole. It’s baked into the political economy of climate collapse, border militarization, and resurgent fascism. #XR and other movements have been sounding the alarm for years, but the line just keeps going straight… into oblivion.

And yet… There is still hope. Hope doesn’t mean passive optimism, it means seeing that the little power we still have matters. That using it, no matter how small or local or chaotic, is the path.

When we build on the #openweb instead of feeding the #dotcons, that’s power.
When we organize locally, build mutual aid, and share resources without gatekeepers, that’s power.
When we link, when we write, when we resist the urge to block and shame and instead connect and amplify, that’s power.

None of this is perfect, it’s not about purity, it’s about action. And that action doesn’t need to scale overnight. It just needs to grow, slow, messy, rooted. Because here’s the thing the right knows and the left forgets: Power isn’t given. It’s taken, built, and – at best – shared.

So let’s stop waiting for permission, stop fearing the imperfections. The future depends on us using the power we still have – to make more.

Let’s grow it, seed by seed.

Why does any of this matter?

Because power matters, and power is never given – it’s taken, built, and at its best, shared. That’s why we care. That’s why the #Fediverse matters.

Let’s rewind: Private property wasn’t born from reason or consensus. It came from someone with a club drawing a line in the sand and saying:

“Cross this, and I’ll kill you.”

That’s the origin of power in the current #mainstreaming paths – violence, enclosure, and exclusion. This is not the foundation of the #Fediverse.

The Fediverse flows from a different source, built in open, social webs, where the lines we draw are “blowing in the wind.” Yes, a lot of people don’t get this. That’s why they try to jam it back into old models: branding, control, platforms, “governance,” and “best practices.” They want order. They want power they can hold.

But here’s the thing, There is such a thing as society, and we need to build tools that reflect this, not deny it. The beauty, and challenge, of the #Fediverse is that there is no central governance.
And that’s a good thing. Because it means we aren’t trapped by legacy systems of control. We don’t have to fit into the broken economies and top-down paths that dominate the “real” outside world.

The Fediverse was born from the “cats” of libertarianism and anarchism (without the [O]). And in this space, we have the radical opportunity to build different, native paths, based in trust, mutual aid, and the #4opens. But to keep building this, we have to compost the mess pushing: People pushing “common sense” corporate-style governance are part of the problem, they want to tame the wild, they want hierarchy where there should be networks, they want control where we need flow.

To be native to the Fediverse, we have to stop importing “common sense” control systems. Instead, we must use code – and culture – to build native #openweb society. Tools that empower. Processes that are messy, open, federated, and yes, hard to define. Organizing for community empowerment need to embed anti “common sense” in the same way the Fediverse is anti-enclosure. Because if we forget this… We don’t build a better web, we just recreate the old one with new colours. Let’s not just repeat history, let’s not draw new hard lines in the sand with the same threat of old clubs. A step away from this is to build bridges, not borders.

It would be helpful to talk about the industrial-scale air freshener being sprayed to mask the stench of collapse. An example, while Gaza burns and genocide unfolds in real time, too many on the soft left are busy sniffing their own ideological mess.

“Oh, but they used a plane once…”

“Oh, that project isn’t perfect, so let’s not support it at all…”

“Oh, their anti-Nazi message is just a header image. That’s clearly useless propaganda…”

This is troll logic. This is #psyop brainrot, it’s weaponized idealism used to undermine action.

“Sure, they’re doing good - but not perfect. So discredit, disengage, demoralize.”

It’s the tactic troll farms use on the #dotcons to feed manipulative, because it appeals to insecure egos and a culture soaked in #stupidindividualism, where the look of moral “purity” is more important than building power, solidarity, or impact.

And too many fall for it, because they don’t see it for what it is: A feedback loop that leads nowhere. A stalling tactic. A demobilizer. It’s not accidental, it’s designed to stop us acting.
It’s strategic passivity masquerading as moral high ground.

“Don’t link to that, it’s not flawless.”
“Don’t share that resource, the font is ugly.”
“Don’t support that campaign, they once took a selfie on a plane.”

Are you serious? While people are being murdered by states, you’re sniffing out aesthetic imperfections? Here’s #KISS:

Nobody wins by demanding perfection.

Nobody builds movements by tearing down every action.

Nobody helps anyone by blocking solidarity and smearing efforts.

We need to focus attention, not fragment it. We need to act in coalitions, not purity circles, we need to smell the rot, not cover it with ideological air freshener. Because this isn’t a game, it is about #powerpolatics, and how it’s wielded or lost. And while you troll your own side for imaginary infractions, the fascists are laughing – and organizing.

Please, please try and STOP being a prat, thanks.

When we block thinking, it’s pratish #dotcons behaviour

We’re living through a cultural shift. The #Fediverse, the #openweb, and grassroots tech projects like #OMN were born to challenge the values of the corporate web, not to reproduce them.
But what are we doing instead? We’re seeing people attacked simply for linking to context and history. Linking is native to the open web. Attacking people for linking? That’s native to #dotcons. Take this example: When we post links to hamishcampbell.com, a site with over 20 years of radical media history, no tracking, no ads, no monetization, some people respond with hostility. Instead of engaging, they block, slur, and accuse.

Why? Because the link was shared on a #dotcons platform? Because it challenges their gatekeeping norms? It’s absurd. The truth is simple: #KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid.
This site is part of a long history of grassroots movements. No one is selling anything. No one is farming clicks. Yet bitter, shrinking cliques still push to block it. That kind of behaviour? It’s at best compost – something to shovel through as we grow better soil.

If you don’t get why this matters, start here: Why linking on the open web matters. Not linking is a dangerous cultural regression. The act of linking is a kind of mutual aid: it’s memory, solidarity, and a way to keep the commons visible. When you attack people for linking, you’re actively damaging the infrastructure we need to resist the #deathcult of #neoliberal capitalism.

Here’s another angle worth reading: CrimethInc on mutual aid vs. charity. Mutual aid is not charity. Linking is not self-promotion. These are fundamental ideas. The #Fediverse is built on these values, it thrives when people share freely. But when we import #blocking behaviour and #dotcons paranoia, we replace trust with fear. We end up with closed circles, bad vibes, and petty gatekeeping.

This is not how we build shared infrastructure. This is not how we win. So please: Let’s stop slurring people for sharing knowledge. Let’s stop policing links with fear. Let’s link more, think more, and rebuild grassroots, networked culture rooted in trust, not control. Because without this? We’re just another branded platform, with nicer avatars and the same old decay underneath.

The Fediverse is opening, but there is a cost

With the #Fediverse gaining increasing #mainstreaming attention, we’re entering a familiar cycle, an influx of well-funded #NGO-branded projects trying to “fix” the #openweb by reshaping it in their own narrowing and to often blinded paths.

Take this year’s #chatteringclass event, #FediForum. Alongside breathless praise, last year, for #Threads joining the #opensocialweb space, we’re seeing the launch of shiny new tools: #BonfireSocial, #Channelorg, #Bounce. That promise innovation and ecosystem growth, but look closer, and you’ll see the #NGO pattern: branding over substance, silos in disguise, and a creeping return of the mini #dotcons under new, friendlier wrappers.

Let’s take Channel.org, On the surface, it looks like a #mainstreaming version of the #OMN project #indymediaback – community news channels, a grassroots publishing model, maybe even respectful federation. But scratch that surface and the cracks show quickly:

The default feeds are anaemic #NGO fodder
The orgs list reads like a who’s who of liberal foundations, with the usual hidden gatekeeping logic behind the scenes.
And it’s yet another “pay or pray” model: either be a professional #NGO or get nudged out.

In short, it’s likely just more #techshit to compost. A well-polished box built to contain, not empower. A place where “participation” is narrow and boring. This isn’t to say there’s zero value. There will be overlap with what we’re doing in the #OMN and #indymediaback spaces. But experience tells us, these projects rarely cooperate. They prefer to rebuild from scratch, with branding and compliance hardcoded. They see networks as products to manage, not native cultures to nurture. In the end they sell out, it happens.

And the result? A growing layer of parasites attaching themselves to the living Fediverse. That familiar smell of funding cycles, strategy decks, and locked-down roadmaps. We’ve seen this before. We know where it leads. The real question isn’t what’s new? It’s what’s native?

We don’t need a branded reboot of the same paths, what we do need is more funded and sustainable grounded, messy, radically open alternatives. Ones with deep roots in social movement history, not just nice UX. Ones that resist capture, and refuse in the end to turn community into product.

That’s the path we’re on, if the NGO track wants to build parallel paths, fine. Just don’t expect us to be polite about this mess making, we’ve already walked that road too many times. Live and let live, compost #techshit and build real alternatives #KISS

You know your getting big when parasites like this start to attach… salt and branding irons come to mind.

The wall of funding silence

In the sprouting landscape of #openweb infrastructure, it’s not just code that gets ignored, it’s the possibility of change itself. Projects like #makeinghistory, part of the wider Open Media Network (#OMN), aren’t asking for much. They’re not flashy. They’re not political in the mainstream sense. They just quietly build the back-end tools that allow people to document their histories, publish from the grassroots, and hold space for the memory of struggle that shape our progressive liberalism. But that seems to be too much.

The wall of funding silence – We’ve submitted funding proposals – dozens over the years, to every channel supposedly set up to fund the non-mainstream side of tech. From #NLnet to #NGI, from “open futures” to the latest EU moonshots. Most of the time, the response is a polite no, a vague shrug, or silence.

Sometimes, we get honesty – “This kind of effort is very hard to seek grants for” or “I don’t have an obvious candidate for you.” What they don’t say is what’s really going on: The system does fund this kind of work, look at the bonfire fresco as an example, but only when it’s a shadow of the status quo.

There’s a path through this, if we’re honest about the rules of the game. One such route is the #makeinghistory project, a non-threatening, archive-based approach that doesn’t scream radical, but quietly lays the groundwork for deeper change. What funders may not realize (or perhaps they do) is that by supporting it, they also enable development on #indymediaback and the metadata “soup” back-ends of the OMN, the very infrastructure needed to reboot truly grassroots media.

It’s a shadow funding path. And yes, that might feel cynical. But if you’re unwilling to fund change directly, maybe you’ll fund the shadows of change. Sometimes the only way to sneak truth past the gatekeepers is through the side door.

We do need to get past this broken balance, the hard part is that many of these funders do think they’re doing good. And to be fair, they are, a little. But the balance is broken. That imbalance is invisible to most, especially those inside the comfort of stable institutions. When we push back, it looks like we’re hitting “good” people with little sticks. It’s messy, and it’s easy for them to just turn away. We get told to be grateful. To celebrate, the seedling being planted in the foreground, while bulldozers level the rest of the forest behind it.

Stick or Carrot? So what do we do? We talk about sticks and carrots. The truth is, our sticks are tiny, dwarfed by corporate lobbying, government inertia, and internal conservatism. The peaceful, hippy route changes nothing long-term, but conflict isn’t working either. We’re stuck in between, too radical for the boardroom, too polite for the barricades.

But here’s a thought: maybe it’s not about the size of the stick, but where we aim it. We’re not here to fight good people. We’re here to point out that a little good is not enough, not when the stakes are this high. If we don’t build space for change, it won’t happen. And if funders like #NLnet want to be the change they speak of, then they need to fund the infrastructure that makes it possible, even if it’s uncomfortable. Even if it’s messy. Even if it’s indirect…

What Now? We’ll give it a month. Then maybe we nudge a bit harder. But no shame, no blame. Just a call for balance, for trust, for a shift in what “doing good” really means.

The pushing of doomed projects

#OMN #makeinghistory #indymediaback #NGI #NLnet #NGIzero #openweb #4opens #deathcult #mainstreaming #funding #changechallenge

The story: power, truth, and walking the fun path

Our powerlessness feeds our desire to hate. This is not a personal failing – it’s a social design flaw. A path built on alienation and distraction will always funnel frustration into polarisation. That’s why the controversy-driven algorithms of the #dotcons (corporate social media platforms) are not just annoying, but actively harmful. They feed on our despair, and we, often unknowingly, feed on the drama they serve back to us.

It’s a closed loop of spectacle and spite, profitable to the #nastyfew but corrosive to us, the meany. An extractive business model built on social breakdown. And yet, many of us know this. So why do we stay? Because stepping away from this mess is hard. It takes more than wishful thinking. It takes movement. Not only that, but it takes organising. It takes the kind of networked activism and lived alternatives the Open Media Network (#OMN) has been building and trying to seed for the last ten years

Let us not overlook vital things, because of the bulk of trifles confronting us.

Truth isn’t declared, it’s built. #Postmodernism taught us that truth is slippery. That’s fine, but in the hands of #mainstreaming culture, that slipperiness has become a tool of endless distraction and decay. People say things like they are true because they feel true. They build tech platforms because they believe in them. They sell movements as brands because it looks like change. But let’s be honest: wishing something into truth does not make it true.

What makes things true is collective struggle, shared purpose, and concrete acts of solidarity. A load of social work, grounded activism, and careful trust-building make something true. This is the hard path, but it’s also the only one worth walking, and when we do it together with joy it’s the happy path.

Pettiness separates; breadth unites. Let us be broad and big.

The #geekproblem, again, is too often a part of this mess. Writing code is seen as a kind of truth declaration. “Look, it runs! So it must be real!” But a thing that compiles is not the same as a thing that lives. Tech without community is a corpse. For anything to matter, you need people. And to keep people, you need some rough-and-ready PR. You need actual engagement. You need trust, time, and probably a bit of music and food too. We can’t engineer our way out of this crisis. We have to organise our way out.

The #Lifecult vs. the #Deathcult. What we’re up against isn’t just bad ideas, it’s a worship of stability, spectacle, and control, the illusion of movement through aesthetic alone, no real challenge to the dominant system. It feels warm. It promises safety. But it leaves no room for difference, contradiction, or rebellion, this is inside both “cult”.

It requires less mental effort to condemn than to think

This is why we don’t need worship, we need practical action. Change and challenge are not side effects of our projects – they are the sharp point. We don’t do this work to be liked, we do it because there is no other way to make things true. And if we do this together, it becomes fun and meaningful – we create social “truth”.

Working with the #Eurocrats (and other impossible people). Let’s talk about the institutions. The #EU. Local governments. #NGOs. Big tech “allies.” They are hopelessly incompetent when it comes to grassroots tech and progressive social change. But here’s the thing, they will not go away on their own. If we don’t push, the right-wing will step in and push harder. That’s mess is already happening.

Revolution is but thought carried into action.

So we take the harder path, we show up, try to guide. We keep the door open even when it slams in our face. And yes, it’s exhausting. We’ve tried to work with #mainstreaming people. Many are unbelievably vile, and worst of all, they have no idea they’re behaving badly. They don’t see their role in the decay. They don’t see the crisis, because the spectacle of control makes everything look fine.

But we see it, and we are not powerless, refusing the mess is about rebuilding the commons. Yes, the current #mainstreaming is a mess. A deep, systemic, soul-grinding mess. But we should not put up with it. That’s what #OMN is for. That’s what projects like #indymediaback, #OGB (Open Governance Body), and the broader #openweb movement are trying to hold space for.

We don’t need more hype. We need slow, messy, grounded work:

Listen more than we preach.
Read each other’s code, politics, and history before rewriting.
Talk about our failures honestly.
Grow media and networks that are native to community, not layered on top like #dotcons digital colonialism.
Build up our own cultures of care and collaboration in the #openweb to replace the dying ones.

This is fun, not a strategy of purity or perfection, it’s a strategy of survival, and even joy.
Ideas? Responses? This is not a closed story, it’s a beginning. If you’re reading this and feeling the weight of it, good. That’s where we start from. But let’s not stop there. Come build, talk, and argue. Come plant seeds, come help make the mess into compost.

All the quotes are from Emma Goldman

Collaborative futures “Go Outside”

A brief literary diversion to get back to our coding and #UX design. In the book News from Nowhere, William Morris invites us to dream, but more than that, he asks us to build. Written in 1890, this visionary novel imagines a world beyond capitalism: no money, no bosses, no state, just people living together in beauty and cooperation, with practical labour, shared resources, and a deep reverence for the land.

For the Open Media Network (#OMN), Morris’s imagined future is not a quaint artifact of socialist utopianism. It offers living lessons, tools, for those of us rebuilding the balance of collective systems of media, communication, and trust from the ground up.

But these lessons come with a challenge, theory is easy, communication is hard. Morris wasn’t naïve about the criticisms he’d face. In News from Nowhere, he playfully mocks the kind of rigid, #mainstreaming or book-bound political thinking that critiques from a distance. In one scene, a bookish character is told off:

“You have so muddled your head with mathematics, and with grubbing into those idiotic books about political economy (he he!), that you scarcely know how to behave… It is about time for you to take some open-air work, so that you may clear away the cobwebs from your brain.”

This is more than a literary joke. It’s a call to stop abstracting and start relating, to the world, to each other, to the work in front of us.

Let’s get back to focusing on coding in grassroots tech and media paths where we are trying to move beyond the current #mainstreaming, we face a similar issue: we to often fall back on rewriting. If a project doesn’t make sense, or if it feels messy or “badly coded,” we’re tempted to scrap it and start over. It’s always easier to build something from scratch than to understand and contribute to a shared vision.

But that instinct, while human, is deadly to collaboration. Reading code is like reading a community, you’re presented with a program someone else wrote, and for whatever reason, you need to understand it, whether to fix something or build something bigger, it will likely be painful. Their choices, habits, or style might seem opaque or even “wrong” to you. But if you rewrite instead of understand, you lose something deeper than code: you lose continuity, you lose trust, you lose the opportunity to actually work together.

This problem isn’t just about software, it’s cultural, it runs through all grassroots movements, including the #OMN. We don’t need another polished platform or a perfect protocol. What we need is the maturity and humility to read each other’s work – whether it’s code, writing, media, or mutual aid projects – and find ways to extend it, rather than erase it.

Morris never intended News from Nowhere to be a literal map of the future. It was always a provocation, a reminder that theory must live in the real world, among people with needs, desires, and contradictions. His “utopia” isn’t managed by frameworks or protocols. It’s governed by relationships. Trust and care are its foundation, not abstract “rules.”

This is crucial for how we approach governance in the #openweb and the society it needs to shape. Rather than getting stuck in ideological loops or trying to design the “perfect” horizontal system, we need to stay grounded. We must treat organising like reading someone else’s program: with patience, attention, and empathy. Don’t rewrite from scratch, build on what’s already alive, collaborative maturity is radical.

The #OMN isn’t about shiny apps or new stacks. It’s about a culture of maintenance and shared ownership, of federated messiness. To get there, we have to often let go of (stupid) individual ego, the idea that our code, our writing, our instance is the one that will “win.” Instead, we aspire to be the kind of people who can join a network not by dominating it, but by understanding it. By reading what came before, by contributing to a path that strengthens the whole.

As in Morris’s world, the future doesn’t arrive through force. It grows in the commons. It thrives when people take the time to learn each other’s language, even if that language is clumsy, half-broken, or unfamiliar. This is the path from utopia to everyday practice, what News from Nowhere offers the #OMN and any grassroots horizontal movement today:

Understand before rewriting. Your time is better spent in solidarity than in solitude.
Theory without practice is noise. Go outside. Apply ideas in real communities.
Culture matters more than code. Values, trust, and shared rituals hold systems together.
Slow is not bad. Messy is not failure. These are signs of life, not dysfunction.

Let’s be very clear, building any shared future isn’t easy. But if we can move past the reflex to rewrite, and instead read, listen, and extend, then we’re not just writing better code or building better media, we’re building the kind of world past thinkers like Morris dreamed of. One worth the hard, meaningful work that is at the centre of the value streams in the book. This can be fun.

William Morris – Bridging Theory and Practice in News from Nowhere

This post is from being a part of this Oxford reading group. Feedback on William Morris, his life and books, which doesn’t only critique capitalism and dream about its collapse, but also offers a compelling vision of what comes after. Imagines a society without money, coercion, or hierarchical governance. Power is radically distributed, labour is voluntary and meaningful, and the commons is at the centre of life. It’s not a managerial future, it’s an organic one, shaped by lived values. This mirrors the path of the #OMN, building tools, processes, and networks that support autonomy and participation, not through top-down control or commercial funding, but through collective action and care.

With a little bit of historical context, it is clear why William Morris prods his critics, he anticipates the scepticism from theoretically thinkers, especially those following in the tradition of Marx and Engels. In one exchange, Morris inserts a moment of humour to push back against armchair critics. The narrator, William Guest, is exploring a utopian future guided by Dick, a cheerful and capable local. They encounter Bob, a character marked by his outdated bookishness and preference for abstract theory over lived experience. When Guest accidentally slips up, forgetting he’s meant to be posing as someone from overseas rather than from the past, Bob calls him out. Dick steps in with a scathing but playful remark:

“The fact is, I begin to think that you have so muddled your head with mathematics, and with grubbing into those idiotic books about political economy (he he!), that you scarcely know how to behave. Really, it is about time for you to take some open-air work, so that you may clear away the cobwebs from your brain.”

The laughter after “political economy” is key. Morris isn’t just poking fun, he’s positioning his vision as something deliberately different. Rather than being a blueprint built from existing leftist theory, his utopia grows out of lived practice and collective labour. He acknowledges the critiques Marxist thinkers might level, but counters with a subtle provocation: leave the theory room and go outside. Work with your hands. Test your ideas in the open air.

Theory is not dismissed outright, but it is secondary to active participation in community life. Morris invites readers to imagine a world shaped not only by critique, but by doing. His utopia isn’t a perfect extrapolation from Marxist doctrine; it’s an imaginative leap into what might happen when people stop only theorising and start building together.

This is core to the #OMN story, the #openweb failed in part because it became a playground for commercial, #geekproblem abstraction or academic debates, or worse, captured by institutions that fear mess and openness. Morris reminds us that we need doing, not just thinking – and that horizontal systems only thrive when they’re lived and felt, not just diagrammed.

This is a vision without dogma, unlike the rigid structures of Marxist utopia or the technocratic dreams of platform capitalism, Morris offers a soft, slow, human-scale path. It’s full of contradiction, it’s messy, and it values beauty, leisure, and craft. It’s grounded in love for place, people, and cooperative labour.

Horizontal organising as culture, not system, governance happens through conversation, relationships, and shared values. There are no formal elections or bureaucracies. Everything operates on trust, accountability, and mutual care, built over time, not imposed from above. This is a needed lesson for grassroots organising.

The #OMN doesn’t need polished governance frameworks before people act. It needs lived participation, native cultures of trust, and tools that reflect those values. Morris shows that horizontal organising isn’t a tech stack or a voting app, it’s a culture. Projects like the #OGB are about reclaiming this messiness. The idea is not to replace one form of control with another (just more “open”), but to nurture space where real community publishing, trust, and difference can coexist. Like Morris’s vision, it’s a lived, imperfect commons, not a polished platform.

What people in the #OMN path can learn is that utopia is not a blueprint, it’s a compass. Use it to orient, not to dictate. Theory must be grounded in doing. Don’t build systems people can’t live in. Trust is built in the day-to-day and governance starts in how we relate to each other. Beauty, leisure, and joy matter, alternative systems fail when they forget to be human.

News from Nowhere is not a fantasy novel, It’s better to see it as an early manual for how to feel our way into better futures, this path aligns with the #OMN mission of rebuilding media and communication from the ground up, with openness, care, and community at its core.

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

#Oxford

Telegram messaging app is dieing

Telegram partnering with Elon’s #AI to distribute #Grok inside chats is a clear line crossed. This matters because private data ≠ training fodder, bringing Grok (or any #LLM) into messaging apps opens the door to pervasive data harvesting and normalization of surveillance.

This is an example of platform drift: Telegram was always sketchy (proprietary, central control, opaque funding), but this is active betrayal of its user base, especially those in repressive regions who relied on it.

Any #LLM like Grok in chats = always-on observer: Even if “optional,” it becomes a trojan horse for ambient monitoring and a normalization vector for AI-injected communication.

“Would be better if we had not spent 20 years building our lives and societies around them first.”

That’s the #openweb lesson in a sentence, that the #dotcons will kill themselves. This is what we mean by “use and abuse” of these platforms which have been driven by centralization, adtech, and data extraction, that they inevitably destroy the trust that made them popular. It’s entropy baked into their #DNA. As Doctorow calls this #enshitification, the tragedy is how much time, emotion, and culture we invested in them – only to have to scramble for alternatives once they inevitably betray us.

What to do now, first step, remove data from your account then delete telegram app, not just for principle, but for your own safety. Move to alternatives – #Signal for encrypted, centralized messaging (trusted but closed server). There are other more #geekproblem options in the #FOSS world but like #XMPP, #RetroShare, or good old email+GPG can work too, but they can be isolating, so stick to #signal if you’re at all #mainstreaming.

Then the second step, build parallel #4opens paths by supporting and develop alt infrastructure like the #Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.), #OMN (Open Media Network – decentralized media), XMPP and #p2p-first protocols, #DAT/#Hypercore, #IPFS, or #Nostr etc.

Yeah, things will get worse before they get better, what we’re seeing now is the terminal phase of the #dotcons era. These companies are devouring themselves and will eventually collapse under the weight of their contradictions. The question is, will we have built anything to replace them?

If not, authoritarian tech (like Elon’s empire) fills the void. That’s why we rebuild the “native” #openweb, even if it’s slow, messy, and underground. That’s why projects like #OMN and #Fediverse matter. If you’re reading this, you’re early to the rebuild, welcome, let’s do better this time.

The Mess – If You Don’t Value Things, You Destroy Them

We live inside and meany of us under a system for 200 years, global capitalism, where value is determined not by care, connection, or any collective well-being, but by market logic. If something is not valued in that narrow logic, it is treated as waste. This means that if you don’t actively value the alternatives – you will “accidentally” destroy them. This applies to tech, culture, nature, and community.

In this, tech, has a problem of misplaced value, people still keep using #mainstreaming tools – the platforms and apps of the #dotcons – because they’re easy, because everyone else does, or simply out of habit. But this actively erodes the alternatives we’ve built: It disempowers projects like #visionontv, #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback. It centralizes control, disconnects us from human-scale governance, and reinforces #stupidindividualism.

This highlights the balance of social change vs. technological change. We must be clear: social change without tech will stall, and tech change without social grounding will fail or harm. With the #OMN projects, the #OGB is designed to bridge this divide. It’s not dogmatic, so no rigid ideology fully owns it. But it’s balanced, so many groups can come to accept it, if we can just get it implemented by a committed few.

But this implementation is hard, because we’re all facing BLOCKING, #BLOCKING and the #deathcult. We all BLOCK, we all turn away from truths that feel uncomfortable: Liberals block radical alternatives. Dogmatists block flexible, balanced ones. Most people just block anything that complicates their worldview.

And after 40 years of #neoliberalism, this #deathcult logic is deep inside us all, a vicious cycle of #stupidindividualism. Without community ownership, without collective vision, our tools fail: Projects decay into power politics and people retreat into passivity or purity spirals. And the worship of “personal freedom” just becomes fuel for the fire. We’re trapped in a feedback loop of: Individualism → Disconnection → Destruction → Fear → More individualism.

Change is messy, it’s supposed to be, that’s why we need to give/take ownership of our #openweb infrastructure. We need democratic instincts, not clean #PR. We need value-driven mess, not market-driven clarity. We need to embrace the #KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) path – precisely because it’s the hardest thing for people to do in this world of shiny distractions.

Final point is you are part of this, a lot of people are passive, lazy, even stupid – but not because they’re bad, more because the system makes them this way, because it rewards disinterest. And many of them – many of you – can’t even see the problem, because you’re so deep inside it. That’s the trap, the invisible BLOCK we must face. That’s what the #OMN and #OGB try to push through. So yes – I’m probably pointing the finger at YOU. But also inviting you to build, to grow, to compost the myths and grow something more real, more humanistic.

#KISS