To make sense of the social/tech #hashtags I’ve been using for the last decade, you need a simple but often avoided tool: ideology. This isn’t abstract theory for academics. It’s a practical way of seeing patterns in how people organise, build, and fight over the world. The idea has been around since at least Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and runs through modern political thinking via people like Antonio Gramsci. The core point is straightforward: large groups of people don’t act randomly. They cluster around shared assumptions, about power, about trust, about how the world works. Those shared assumptions are what we call ideology.
Over time, thinkers have “distilled” these patterns into rough categories. Left/right. Socialist/capitalist. Authoritarian/libertarian. These aren’t perfect boxes, but they’re useful shorthand. They let us quickly understand where a movement sits, what it values, and – crucially – how it’s likely to behave under pressure.
Now, here’s the bit people in tech often resist, this applies just as much to coding projects and digital communities as it does to governments or political parties. Code is not neutral, every project embodies choices: Who gets to decide? Who gets to participate? What is visible, and what is hidden? What is trusted, and what is controlled? These are ideological questions, even if developers don’t frame them that way.
Take a simple example – A project built around open standards, transparent decision-making, and shared ownership sits in a very different ideological space to – platform built around central control, proprietary systems, and user extraction. You don’t need to argue about labels to see the difference. But the labels – ideology – help you map it quickly. This is where the hashtags come in. They’re not random slogans – they’re shorthand for ideological positions:
#openweb → trust, interoperability, shared commons
#closedweb → control, enclosure, extraction
#4opens → a practical framework for keeping things accountable
#dotcons → capitalism applied to network effects and data capture
#encryptionists → a drift toward fear/control when taken to extremes
#geekproblem → the cultural blind spot where technical people ignore social context
Each tag is a compressed way of pointing at a cluster of assumptions and behaviours. Once you see them as ideological markers, the landscape becomes much clearer. So why does this matter? Without this lens, people in tech tend to fall into two traps:
- Naivety
They believe they’re building “neutral tools,” and are surprised when those tools reinforce existing power structures.
- Confusion
They see conflicts – over moderation, governance, openness – but treat them as personal disagreements instead of ideological clashes. Using ideology cuts through both problems. It lets you say “This isn’t just a disagreement about features. It’s a disagreement about how power should work.” Applying it to real projects.
- Let’s look at something like the #Fediverse – It leans toward decentralisation, openness, and community governance → ideologically closer to left/libertarian traditions. But it still contains tensions: moderation, funding, scaling → where different ideological pulls show up.
- Or take corporate platforms – Centralised control, data ownership, profit extraction → clearly aligned with capitalist, top-down models
These aren’t accidents. They’re outcomes of underlying ideological choices. The hashtag story is a practical tool, not a purity test. This isn’t about forcing everything into rigid categories or arguing over who is “correct.” Ideology is a tool, not a weapon. Used well, it helps you understand why projects succeed or fail, predict where conflicts will emerge to make conscious choices about how you build. Used badly, it turns into dogma and pointless infighting – which is exactly the mess we’re trying to compost.
The #OMN path is grounded in a clear ideological stance of trust over fear, openness over control and commons over extraction. That doesn’t mean it’s easy or pure. It means the direction is explicit. And that’s the real value here: clarity.
Because if you don’t understand the ideological ground you’re standing on, you end up being pushed around by forces you can’t even see. Once you do see it, the landscape changes. Suddenly, the hashtags aren’t just words – they’re a map.
