Disciplined curiosity beats IQ, Oxford

There is a persistent myth pushed in our culture that intelligence – high IQ, academic credentials, elitist education – leads naturally to clear thinking. My organic experience suggests the opposite, what matters is disciplined, skeptical, freethinking curiosity. Without that, intelligence simply becomes a tool for defending whatever assumptions people already hold.

This is one of the reasons many academic environments produce people who are, bluntly, credulous. Not because they lack intelligence, but because the institutional structures around them reward conformity and reputation management far more than genuine curiosity.

Over the last two years I’ve been spending time in and around the university culture in Oxford, participating in discussions, events, and academic life. The experience has been instructive, if in the end frustrating. You would expect a place associated with University of Oxford to be a centre of open intellectual challenge. In practice, it feels like something else: a system that filters, polishes, and reproduces existing assumptions.

This is not universal, some of the hard scientific disciplines still cultivate a form of disciplined skepticism, experiments fail, evidence contradicts theory, so you are expected to question results. The process encourages a narrow but very real culture of doubt, but outside those narrow areas, skepticism to often fades.

Instead, you find intellectual fashion cycles building reputational alliances that push institutional caution based on #blinded ideological signalling. The result can be a strange mix of high intelligence and low #blocking curiosity. People who are good at working inside established frameworks, but much less comfortable questioning the foundations of privilege those frameworks rest on.

This matters for the #openweb and projects like #OMN. I got nowhere here as many of the institutions that might have supported open digital infrastructure – universities, NGOs, research centres – have shifted toward the same #deathcult #mainstreaming #blocking that dominates the wider tech world. Funding cycles shape research priorities, institutional partnerships shape acceptable ideas and career incentives shape what can safely be questioned.

So even where intelligence and resources exist, the culture of disciplined curiosity that drives the needed real innovation is thin if it exists at all. The irony is that the early internet grew out of exactly the same institutions, but with opposite culture. The original World Wide Web ecosystem, the hacker and #FOSS communities, and early grassroots media projects like #indymedia were built by people who combined technical curiosity with deep skepticism about centralised control.

They didn’t wait for institutional approval, they experimented, built #DIY tools that broke things and rebuilt them. That spirit is what projects like #OMN are trying to revive. The goal is not to outcompete corporate #dotcons platforms or impress #NGO academic institutions. The goal is simpler: to build open media infrastructure that communities can use based on small nodes, trust networks and open metadata flows. Simple tools that allow people to publish, share, and connect.

This is a working #KISS approach to rebuilding grassroots media. If the last twenty years of the web have taught us anything, it’s that intelligence alone doesn’t produce healthy systems. You can have brilliant engineers building platforms that clearly undermine democratic communication, it’s the mess that shapes the current #dotcons world.

What makes the difference is curiosity combined with skepticism, the willingness to question the structures that shape our digital lives. Without that, even the smartest institutions drift into the same patterns of credulity and conformity, which is why rebuilding the #openweb is not just a technical project, it’s a cultural one.

For some reflections from the last couple of years around Oxford life and technology culture, see: https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/oxford/

#Oxford #academic #elitist

Why does it feel like so many people have become intolerant prats? A blunt observation: it increasingly feels like many people today are intolerant prats. And worse, this behaviour has started to feel normal. You see it everywhere. Online discussions collapse quickly into hostility. Small disagreements become unthinking moral #blocking were people retreat into camps where any challenge is treated as an attack.

This isn’t just a social media problem, though the #dotcons have certainly amplified it, it’s a deeper cultural shift. For decades the dominant systems shaping our culture have encouraged competition, individualism, and personal branding. The result is what I often call #stupidindividualism – a worldview where the individual ego becomes the centre of everything. In that environment, disagreement stops being part of learning and becomes a threat to identity, so people react defensively, aggressively or dismissively. What used to be debate becomes performance.

The platform problem is when the #dotcons platforms are designed to amplify this behaviour where algorithms reward outrage, tribal loyalty and moral signalling to push conflict to drive engagement. They do not reward patience, nuance, or curiosity, in other words, they are structurally optimised to turn ordinary people into worse versions of themselves. Over time this becomes cultural habit, people start to assume that hostility is normal conversation.

Another factor is the slow collapse of collective spaces. When communities interact face-to-face, or in smaller trust networks, people have to deal with each other as human beings. Relationships create friction but also accountability. In large anonymous digital environments, those social checks weaken. People become avatars and opinions rather than neighbours, this makes it much easier, “natural” to treat each other badly.

Why this matters for the #openweb. If we are trying to rebuild grassroots media and communication infrastructure, we need to recognise that these cultural habits have already spread into many communities, including the tech and activist spaces that should be alternatives. This is one reason projects fragment so easily as small disagreements spiral, people assume bad faith and thus trust collapses.

You end up with endless internal conflict instead of collective building. This isn’t just a personality problem, it’s the legacy of systems that reward attention and conflict rather than cooperation.

A different path can be grown in projects like #OMN which is partly about rebuilding infrastructure, but they are also about rebuilding culture. The idea is simple: smaller networks, trust-based publishing, open metadata flows and simple tools people can run themselves. A #KISS approach to communication infrastructure.

But technology alone doesn’t solve the deeper issue, what actually makes communities work is something much older and simpler: tolerance and curiosity. The ability to disagree without instantly turning disagreement into war. The ability to assume that the other person might have something worth hearing. Without those habits, no infrastructure – open or closed – will function well for long.

Composting the mess – the current online culture is a mess. A lot of the behaviour we see today is the product of twenty years of #dotcons platform design. But mess is also compost, it shows us clearly what doesn’t work. The next generation of the #openweb has an opportunity to build systems that encourage something better: slower conversation, local trust networks, collective responsibility, shared media infrastructure. Less shouting, more listening.

It won’t magically make people perfect. Some people will still be intolerant prats. But at least we won’t be running the entire communication system of society on platforms designed to encourage it.

#KISS

This Oxford mess is a shadow of a larger mess. We were told the story of Prometheus: fire stolen from the gods and given to humans – our first real piece of technology. The myth asks a simple question: what do we do with power once we have it?

In democratic society why do we put up gig work and side hustles, endless surveillance platforms pushing algorithmic attention traps, housing crises and climate collapse all pushed by a handful of billionaires controlling huge parts of the economy. Why do we put up with What with the mess of technocratic oligarchy – a system where technological infrastructure concentrates power instead of distributing it?

The #mainstreaming mythology of the tech founder helped this happen. The “visionary genius” narrative around people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk turned corporate executives into cultural heroes. This mess is simply #KISS oligarchy with better marketing.

Even ancient thinkers warned about this. Plato and Aristotle described how societies cycle through forms of power, and how rule by the wealthy tends to serve the wealthy above everyone else. The irony is that many of today’s tech elitists think of themselves as the new aristocracy – the “smartest people in the room” guiding humanity forward.

Yet the future they’ve built is #techshit platform #feudalism with people monitored constantly, economic life mediated by a few #dotcons platforms. Infrastructure owned by private empires and democratic institutions bought out then sidelined.

The tragedy isn’t that technology failed, it is more that we let our technological imagination be captured by oligarchs. Prometheus gave humanity fire so we could build civilization together, not so a tiny #nastyfew tech CEOs can privatise the flame and sell back the light.

The real question isn’t whether technology will shape the future, it’s who controls it.

#OMN #OpenWeb #TechPower #Oligarchy #Future #Compost

Brexit, tribal politics, ten years on – Still a mess

The tenth anniversary of the #EU referendum is approaching, and there is still talk about economics, institutions, and political strategy. But sitting through a discussion on this subject, the uncomfortable truth remains: the real transformation was not structural, it was psychological. And ten years later, it is still a mess.

The statistics are stark. The divide between “Leavers” and “Remainers” persists long after the referendum itself faded into history. The identities remain entrenched, even as the practical realities that supposedly defined them blur and lose relevance. This suggests the divide is not primarily rational or policy-driven, it is psychological, cultural, and emotional.

In many ways, it is strange – almost absurd – that this split continues to shape British political identity so strongly. The original issue has moved on, the world has shifted, yet the identities remain frozen. For me this persistence comes from the lack of meaningful alternatives, when there is no shared narrative or collective project to replace the old divisions, people hold onto the identities they have, even when they never made any sense.

The hard-right instrumentalisation of the referendum did long-term damage to our social fabric. Political actors pushed tribal framing because it worked, it mobilised people through emotion rather than consensus. But once unleashed, this dynamic did not disappear, it reshaped how people see each other and how they interpret political reality itself.

Political identities existed before Brexit, but there was once a larger middle ground, a messy but functional consensus where disagreement did not translate into mutual hostility. The referendum hardened boundaries that had previously been softer. It turned difference into braking division. A growing disconnect between cultural elitists and broader society, might help to explain why the referendum could become such a powerful symbolic battleground, many people felt excluded from decision-making long before Brexit became the focal point.

What is striking from this event, is how some analyses continue to dismiss the role of algorithmic platforms – the #dotcons – in amplifying these divides. Ignoring the structural role of platform incentives, attention economies, and engagement-driven algorithms feels like a blind spot. Social media did not create division out of nothing, but it undeniably intensified and entrenched #blinded tribal identity. Likewise, dismissing disinformation entirely misses the broader dynamic: even without organised campaigns, for profit algorithm social ecosystems reward emotional narratives over any shared understanding.

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of discussions about tribal politics is the quiet resignation that often accompanies them. “That’s the way the world is,” some commentators say, as if polarisation were an inevitable feature of modern life rather than a social outcome shaped by technology, media, and bad political choices. From my perspective, this fatalism is part of the problem. Disaster in leads to bigger disaster out, accepting division as normal ensures it continues.

The deeper issue is that we have not yet built credible alternatives – social, technological, or cultural – that allow people to see tribal identity. Without shared spaces for dialogue, without media infrastructures designed for cooperation rather than conflict, the divide persists because there is nowhere else for collective energy to go. Ten years on, the lesson of Brexit may not be about sovereignty or trade deals, it may be about how fragile shared reality is, and how easily societies slide into identity-driven conflict when communication systems reward division over understanding.

The challenge now is not to analyse tribal politics, but to outgrow it. That means rebuilding common ground – culturally, socially, and technologically – rather than accepting fragmentation as the new normal. Because if we keep feeding the same dynamics, the outcome is predictable, mess in, and an even bigger mess out.

#Oxford

Who or What Has Consciousness?

A simple question: who – or what – has consciousness? Humans, animals, #AI, or perhaps matter itself? What is consciousness, and why is it different?

Philip Goff (Philosophy, Durham University)
Consciousness is everywhere

Heather Browning (Philosophy, University of Southampton)
Evidence for consciousness in non-human animals

Patrick Butlin (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
The case for AI consciousness

One recurring theme was that consciousness is not just another scientific object to measure. We already know consciousness from the inside, we are born into subjective experience. Science can describe physical processes mathematically and externally, but subjective qualities – feeling, sensation, the experience of “I am” – resist straightforward physical explanation.

This creates a gap where physical science explains structure, behaviour, and observable mechanisms, but not questions about experience, just function. #Philosophy enters here, asking not only what consciousness does, but what it is.

Some perspectives suggested a spectrum, simple systems may have simple forms of consciousness, while complex organisms have richer ones. This takes physical reality and asks what happens if consciousness is treated as a fundamental feature rather than an emergent accident.

The discussion of non-human animals focused on suffering, feeling, and ethical implications. We cannot directly access animal minds, so researchers rely on behavioural and neurological markers to infer consciousness. Despite this, there is growing consensus that animals experience subjective states, especially those capable of learning, emotional responses, and adaptive behaviour.

The ethical consequences are obvious that if animals feel, they can suffer, if they suffer, human systems must reckon with this. The discussion touched on animal cruelty and the moral responsibilities emerging from this understanding of non-human consciousness.

The most contentious section involved #AI consciousness, intelligence vs experience. One argument suggested that modern AI has reached human-level inference in certain domains, even systems trained purely on historical text. From this view, sufficiently complex information processing might be enough for consciousness.

But tensions emerged that AI systems are not embodied. Solving “geek problems” does not imply subjective experience, highlights the divide: Computationalists – see consciousness as potentially arising from information processing. Where biological or embodied perspectives, argue that lived, physical existence may be essential. The discussion felt unresolved.

Cultural observations of the event: the engineers and “geek” audience clustered at the back of the room, reflecting the broader cultural divide between technical and philosophical approaches. Much of the debate mirrored this tension, information-processing models versus lived experience and embodiment. There was also a sense that many people rarely reflect on their own use of consciousness, how we attend, choose, or engage with the world.

No clear resolution emerged – and perhaps none is coming soon. What became clear is that consciousness sits at the boundary between disciplines. Science struggles to capture subjective experience, while philosophy cannot avoid engaging with empirical discoveries.

The question of who or what has consciousness remains open, but the debate itself reveals something deeper: our theories of consciousness often reflect our cultural assumptions about intelligence, technology, and what it means to be alive.

#Oxford

The Blavatnik worldview, book talk

A talk on a new book by Pepper Culpepper on how corporate scandals could be used to save liberal “democracy”. This talk is the familiar fantasy of elitist institutions like the Blavatnik School, Oxford. Culpepper and co author Lee reframe disasters from Enron to Cambridge Analytica not as structural failures of a system built to concentrate power, but as healthy “corrections” that supposedly can be used by people like them to renew democracy.

In this telling, public anger is something to be safely channelled into regulation, corporations remain indispensable, and democracy survives as a managerial process overseen by the normal “progressive” liberalish policy priests. It is #deathcult logic, polished up, to worship the system while denying its violence, recurring catastrophe not as proof of collapse, but as evidence that the machine still works – if only the right people are allowed to control it.

The Blavatnik worldview in one sentence “Capitalism is broken, but only experts can fix it, without threatening those who benefit from it.” The tone is elitists pessimism dressed as realism, the talk opens with managed the pessimism “Yes, things are bad…” “…but lives are improving” “…and the liberal order still basically works” “…we just need better policy”. Everything else is ornamentation, democracy is talked about constantly, but control is never offered.

This is the #deathcult chant, not in any way apocalyptic enough to demand rupture, and also not hopeful enough to empower people. It’s pessimism, justifying elitist management, so no real change. They talk about democracy, but notice how it’s framed: Democracy = policy capacity, regulatory competence, party systems and institutional continuity. Democracy is not found in any real popular control, public ownership, exit, refusal, redistribution, or material power. The people appear as voters, outrage generators, legitimacy providers, but never as agents who might take any part in control, the old mainstreaming tradition of social democracy as crowd management.

The book is worship of policy nerds vs fear of the #techbrows, a strange inversion at work, that billionaires are dangerous, reckless and markets are running amok. The solution for them, is therefore, “we need policy experts to save us.” who can circulate through the same elitist institutions, depend on the same funding systems and never threaten ownership or accumulation. Yes, capitalism is “broken” – but only as a governance problem to solve. This is instead of any stress of public vs concentrated power, in their book, it’s an intra-elite turf war, sold as democracy.

They get very close to truth here “capitalism is a minority of people with a lot of power, unafraid to use it.” But then they refuse any logical conclusion, if what they say is true, then regulation is insufficient, as any real accountability requires ownership change and democracy requires material leverage to function. Instead, they do a quick pivot to stakeholder capitalism and value generation as a path to “put capitalism back on its feet”. This is a system that’s killing people, while insisting itself must stay alive.

Public capitalism is a bloodless fantasy that might sound radical to a privileged chattering class. But it’s the same failed mess, where the public gets, exposure, risk, volatility while the elitists keep control and set the agenda. It is inequality, endlessly acknowledged, but never touched, the normal elitists preference disguised as inevitability.

There, assumptions are wrong, yes, the is a very real fear of autocracy, but not of oligarchy, they are worried about autocracy, but they are not worried enough about billionaires controlling media, capital, thus veto over policy, regulatory capture and economic coercion. Why? Because oligarchy is their ecosystem. Autocracy is framed as something external, crude, foreign, where oligarchy is polite, networked, respectable… and pays for book launches at the Blavatnik School we sip wine at, after the event.

They are scared by “bad populism” but love “good populism” as outrage without power, believing, outrage can be used to drive a very narrow idea of reform, scandals and anger can be “harnessed” as a fuel for what they see as elitist balance. The public is a matchstick, a controlled burn to open up a space for their class (literally their children) the future“policy entrepreneurs” who, with generational wealth, still rich enough to volunteer, bored enough to care and insulated enough to fail, its politics as a hobby of the ideal rich.

In the Q&A they talk about media fragmentation = democracy in trouble (but not elitist paths). They worry we “can’t agree on facts”. But they don’t worry about who owns platforms, who shapes narratives, who funds think tanks, who sets the Overton window. Fragmentation is blamed on the public, concentration is never blamed on capital. Then we have #AI outrage already being pre-neutralised, the AI bubble “will pop”, they say. The question is, “how do we use that outrage?” Not, how do we let people decide, how do we transfer control, how do we prevent enclosure in the first place.

Outrage is something to be channelled into managerial politics with the Churchillian cop-out “democracy is the worst system except all the others.” Which translates into, lower expectations, accept elitist rule to manage decline politely.

In this path, corporations are treated as unavoidable, people are treated as incapable, you get a strong feeling from this talk and book that this is it is not democratic theory, rather paternalism with footnotes. The core lie, unspoken underneath everything, is “we can fix capitalism without shifting power.” Every answer assumes that capitalism must remain, corporations must remain, and that the elitists must mediate and guided the public not to challenge this.

It’s elite self-soothing, but yes, they aren’t wrong that the system is broken, they’re wrong about who is allowed to fix it.

#Oxford

Leadership in the Era of Quantum and AI – A Reaction

This lecture was framed as leadership in a time of economic, social, and environmental crisis. In reality, it was a performance, a ritual reaffirmation of the system that generated those crises. A talk about “leadership” steeped in the language of inevitability, technological salvation, and corporate myth-making.

The speaker, Muhtar Kent – Coca-Cola executive, delivered a brand sermon for the young acolytes of the #deathcult. Unconsciously or not, he was selling the two current hype bubbles: Quantum and AI. Both framed as paradigm shifts. But the problem with this mythology is that both are, right now, more fantasy than function.

#AI has no intelligence. None. It produces plausible text and performs statistical pattern recognition. That’s it. The current explosion of PR and funding is about destroying value, not creating it, replacing labour, creativity, and human meaning with cheap automated exhaust.

#Quantum computing, at present, has about the power of a 1990s scientific calculator at best. Much of the PR is built on pre-calculated solutions dressed up as magical quantum speed. It’s fudging. It’s lying. And yet, like AI, billions flow into the hype.

Leadership, with no connection to reality, this worshipper message was simple: Leadership is a promise, and a brand is a promise kept, his talk had neither of these. It’s a normal mess, a distillation of the managerial worldview; reality flattened into branding. Leadership becomes not action, not accountability, not ethics, but worship, corporate devotion, a smooth surface projected onto a burning world

The Q&A: Was a closed circle, the questions that followed were trapped inside the same narrow, pointless frame.

Q: How do we restore trust in institutions and politics?
A: Politics is a “bad brand”. The solution, apparently, is to partner with subnational actors, mayors, governors, etc. He avoids the structural crisis entirely and reframes it as a marketing problem.

Q: Does AI in Coca-Cola advertising create value or destroy it?
A: He claims it’s just applying old ideas with new tools. Again, pure branding logic.

The was more… the audience, wannabe future leaders of the global managerial class, were sycophantic, unquestioning, hungry for status. Every question was asked from inside the bubble. No challenge. No structural critique. No awareness of any crises unfolding around us. The Audience were not people seeking truth or grappling with this crisis, they were worshippers looking for careers and job validation. Small sharks circling a bigger shark, hoping to learn how to swim with sharper teeth.

Conclusion:

Not leadership – worship.
Not intelligence – PR.
Not value creation – value destruction.

And the people in the room were not thinking their way out of the mess. They were rehearsing how to reproduce it as their path.

#Oxford

The tragedy is that the institutions talking loudest about “leading in the AI age” are the same ones least capable of doing so. They fear uncertainty, fear decentralization, fear the public. So they cling to control, and in doing so accelerate the crisis they claim to be solving.

The glossy rhetoric around “Quantum and AI leadership” makes it sound as if we’ve entered a new epoch where the old rules no longer hold. But strip away the hype, and you find something familiar: the same elitist managerial class, still addicted to control, still mistaking centralization for competence, and still refusing to learn from the last 40 years of crisis.

What has changed is the scale and velocity of the mess they are creating. We’ve built systems we no longer understand, infrastructures too brittle to trust, and economies so captured by the #deathcult of neoliberalism that even existential threats – climate collapse, inequality, runaway tech – are treated as “opportunities” rather than any call for transformation. Leadership, sold at these events, is a performance.

Quantum and AI aren’t the challenge. The challenge is whether we allow the same narrow, extractive logic to shape the next era, or whether we root ourselves again in trust, openness, and the radical idea that people, not systems, are what matter.

Change is Freedom, Change is Life

You don’t get transformative change by building according to the incentives of the dominant system. A post inspired by rereading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia as part of the Utopia Reading Group in #Oxford

“There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Most people choose the easy path: they find a nice, safe hierarchy and settle in. They obey the rules, repeat the slogans, and mistake obedience for belonging. They stop thinking for themselves. They stop changing.

But change is freedom. Change is life.

Le Guin’s The Dispossessed captures the tension perfectly – between the anarchic, cooperative world of Anarres and the closed, hierarchical planet of Urras. It’s not only a science-fiction metaphor; it’s the current mirror of the #openweb we refuse to look into. The “open” world we imagine is already all around us, fragile, fragile seedlings buried beneath layers of control, ego, and fear.

This is the mess we need to compost, we see it every day. Talented people watching their work and lives being wasted. Good minds submitting to stupid ones. Strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change.

Looking back at web history, think of how #Indymedia burned bright for a moment, then was strangled by internal control and external hostility. Think of how the second reboot – visionOntv on PeerTube – tried to keep that radical history alive, only to collapse again under neglect, lack of support, and the dominance of #dotcons platforms. Ten years of grassroots videos deleted, shadowbanned, or “de-prioritized.” That’s oftern what the suffocation of freedom looks like, not jackboots, but the slow deletion of memory.

Everywhere, the potential for something living and new gets buried under the weight of control. When a grassroots project loses its edge because it’s easier to fit into “funding priorities.” When energy turns to exhaustion, creativity to compliance, rebellion to report-writing. This is the logic of the #deathcult – the slow suffocation of change.

The #deathcult thrives on fear and hierarchy, the illusion that safety comes from control.
It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that the system teaches them not to. Managers, bureaucrats, “leaders” are all terrified of what real openness might unleash.

The banality of obedience. Le Guin warned us that the danger of obedience is not stability, it’s death. Urras, the rich capitalist world, runs on obedience. Anarres, the poor anarchist moon, survives on mutual responsibility.

You can’t get transformative change by operating according to the incentives of that system.
That’s why NGO culture and corporate-funded “innovation” projects always fail the real test.
They replicate the very control structures they claim to challenge.

The composting of culture, the natural world understands what our institutions forget: compost happens whether you want it to or not. What’s dead breaks down, and from that decay, new life takes root.

The same is true for culture and technology. The #dotcons and #closedweb platforms trap creativity and channel it into profit. They turn every act of sharing into data extraction, every connection into surveillance. They turn good minds into “content” and living movements into metrics.

We don’t need more “innovation” within this rot, we need composting. That’s what the #OMN (Open Media Network) is for, taking what’s broken and turning it back into living soil.
A simple, federated network built on the #4opens to grow real, grassroots media again, not as a static structure, but as a breathing, evolving commons.

Revolution is not destruction; it’s renewal. It’s the composting of the dead so that the living may grow. Revolution is our obligation, our hope of evolution.

Choosing life over control, to choose change is to choose life. To cling to control is to choose decay. The #OMN is one path to life, open, messy, collective. The alternative is more of what we already have: talent wasted, good minds ground down, courage strangled.

Le Guin’s lesson still stands:
“You cannot buy the revolution.
You cannot make the revolution.
You can only be the revolution.”

Let’s be that change. Let’s compost the dead systems, and make space for what’s next.

#4opens #openweb #OMN #nothingnew #techshit #deathcult #TheDispossessed #UtopiaReadingGroup

Finding the Rainbow Gathering

The #IR view of how to survive in a hostile world

The Changing Character of War programme at #Oxford is discussing Patrick Porter’s new book How to Survive a Hostile World from Stanford University Press. Porter argues for realism – what I’d call the “lawful evil” path of international relations – as the right response in an age of war, economic dislocation, and climate crisis.

The panel includes: Prof. Patrick Porter (Birmingham), Dr. Susan B. Martin (King’s College London), Dr. Jeanne Morefield (Oxford), Dr. David Blagden (Exeter), and Dr. Seán Molloy (Kent).

Porter tackles three standard critiques of realism – that it’s immoral, unrealistic, and provincial – and flips them. He insists realism is moral because it defends the polity where no higher law exists, realistic because it reflects how human groups actually behave, and universal because it can apply beyond the Euro-Atlantic world.

But this is Oxford #IR, so don’t expect much challenge. Realism here really means: how to manage decline without admitting it. It’s hard to argue for realism in an era of #climatechaos and the global hard-right shift. If the state is the “rational actor,” that actor is already captured, elitists circling the wagons while “strongman politics” gets rebranded as “stability.” Expect talk of “peace through strength,” the same logic that once drove Japan before WWII and now drives Israel. They’ll all agree they hate the liberal imperialism of the past 20 years – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya – while quietly defending the same machinery that made it possible.

The deeper question, what’s the optimal flock size for survival in a hostile world? will be avoided, because that would mean admitting that what really matters to them isn’t the state at all, but the tribe: class, in-group, and out-group. Realism today is an ideology for managing collapse, not preventing it. If we want a liveable world and culture, we have to move beyond this toward post-capitalist, trust-based cooperation, not another round of “lawful evil” geopolitics.

By serious academic standards, realism is a “degenerating research program.” Every time reality disproves it, the theory just bolts on new excuses, a patchwork of “yes, but” footnotes that never die. Lacking moral grounding, it hides behind “pragmatism” while refusing to say what’s good or bad. “That’s just how the world works,” they say, mistaking description for wisdom.

Realists claim they see the world as it is: power, conflict, survival. But even within their own logic, it’s full of contradictions, empire pretending to be restraint, militarism dressed as reason. Realism doesn’t always mean war, but it always means preparing for one. For them, the state is sacred and indivisible – the only actor that matters – which is why their worldview drips with Eurocentrism and state worship.

In truth, realism isn’t wrong so much as exhausted: a worldview for a dying world that can’t imagine anything beyond power. In the age of #climatechaos and #deathcult politics, we need a new grounding – trust, cooperation, transparency (#4opens) – rather than fear and force.

Realism is international relations for adult teenagers who never grew up – still desperate to make their childhood world of heroes, villains, and empires real.

Pushing back AI hype and building better futures

This week, Dr. Emily M. Bender (University of Washington), co-author of The AI Con, delivered a much-needed reality check in Oxford, cutting through the fog of #AI PR myths and techno-dystopian smoke. In The Q&A by Professor Catherine Pope (Nuffield Dept. of Primary Care), the conversation explored how AI is being used not to elevate us, but to devalue human creativity, justify surveillance, and concentrate wealth and power in the bands of the #nastyfew

This wasn’t the normal breathless “future of work” keynote. It was a call to arms about the AI Con – What Are We Really Being Sold? Dr. Bender, known for coining the term stochastic parrot, highlights how AI hype isn’t just noise – it’s a strategy, to push unregulated, underperforming, resource-hungry technologies into every part of society. It turns complex problems into opportunities to extract data, deskill more workers, and justify more austerity.

We’re not being sold intelligence, we’re being sold plagiarism machines that mimic but don’t understand, synthetic text extruders trained to sound right, but to often hallucinate. Mathy-maths cloaked in prestige, built on broken benchmarks like the Turing Test – long since reduced to a measure of gullibility.

Anthropomorphism by design, responsibility by none, is insidious that AI systems are designed to mimic humanity. They pull users in through anthropomorphism, but when something goes wrong, no one is held responsible. Not the engineers, not the companies, not the funders. Just the user caught in the middle. As Dr. Bender and others have pointed out, there’s no “intelligence” in AI, just statistics, training data, and the motives of those who built it.

What’s Lost in the Hype?

“We used to do language translation better with fewer resources.”
“Cloud computing is a lie, it’s just someone else’s server burning through energy and water.”

These are the quiet truths ignored by AI boosterism. Dr. Bender laid bare the ecological, cognitive, and political costs:

Corruption pushing ecological waste: AI training and cloud infrastructure depend on water, energy, and mining—routed not where they’re sustainable, but where regulation is weak.

Erosion of trust: Models trained to sound authoritative spread confident falsehoods, degrading public discourse.

Security risks: Code generation tools are notoriously lax, riddled with hallucinations and vulnerabilities.

Dehumanisation of labour: AI doesn't replace bad jobs with good ones, it turns good work into mechanical “oversight” roles, where humans are paid to babysit broken systems.

And in health and care, where these technologies are increasingly being pushed, the stakes are life, dignity, and wellbeing.

What I have personal found is that Oxford is feeding its brightest minds into AI. As institutions bend to corporate funding and hype cycles, critique becomes harder, not easier. But critique is essential. This is a fight about who benefits, and who bears the cost.

Governance, the mess of AI tech-fix paths

Like the Luddites of the 19th century, we’re not against machines, we’re against machines used against us. The Luddites knew that the issue wasn’t the loom, it was who owned the loom. That’s why we need more conversations like this. Not just about what AI is, but about what kind of society we want. And more importantly, who gets to decide.

What could work on these tech pats is:

Smaller, dumber, domain-specific models where needed.
Open standards, not closed corporate APIs.
Tech built with consent, accountability, and ecological limits.
A refusal to let “innovation” be an excuse to undermine public infrastructure.

Above all, we need to centre people, not profit, humility, not hype. Very important not to be a prat about this.

#Oxford

This is what the #dotcons, control, is doing with the #AI mess. to us.

Why Doesn’t Every City Have a Fediverse Server?

A reflection on #Oxford, the web, and the invisible gap we’re not naming. It’s a simple question, but one that says a lot about where we’re at with the #Fediverse and the broader #openweb reboot: Why doesn’t every city have its own Fediverse server?

I’ve been looking – specifically for my city: Oxford, UK. And the answer seems to be… Nope. Nothing. Not a single clearly local Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed or similar instance. This might seem trivial, but it’s actually a big red flag about where we are failing to root the #Fediverse in the real world.

Wait – Why should cities have their own servers? Because servers are more than just infrastructure, they’re community spaces. They are places where shared context matters. In a healthy #openweb ecology, you’d expect to see:

A Mastodon instance for Oxford academics and students
A Lemmy server for Oxfordshire campaigners sharing local issues
A Mobilizon instance for local events, climate actions, social meetups
A PeerTube or Castopod space archiving local talks, indie music, alt-news

These are the digital town halls we should be building. But we’re not. Why? Oxford isn’t just any city. It is where the World Wide Web first found public ground in the UK. I used the first web browser in a room set aside for “the internet” here almost 30 years ago, it was a wonder. It’s a place that is full of geeky students, hackers and programmers. With a deep history of academic freedom and radical thought, that has long served as a symbolic cradle for digital culture. If we can’t see clear Fediverse infrastructure here, something’s broken, and not just in Oxford.

What’s holding us back? Possibilities, the myth of spontaneity? We assume that because the Fediverse is “open,” it will naturally emerge everywhere. It won’t. Like any commons, it needs cultivation, volunteers, funding, attention.

Invisible technical barriers, running a Fediverse server isn’t hard, but it’s also not beginner-friendly. And even “geeky” students are under immense pressure, rents, loans, side gigs. Who’s got time to run infra?

Cultural disconnection, we have a user class and a developer class, and they rarely mix. No one’s stepping up to build for their community, because the tech feels distant, or worse, owned by someone else.

#NGO capture & misplaced focus, a lot of #FOSS energy gets eaten up by grant-funded projects that serve other bureaucratic ends. Meanwhile, grassroots needs, like “a city-based server for sharing local stuff”, get overlooked or dismissed as unscalable.

What do we do? Let’s flip the question around. Why NOT have a Fediverse server in every city? If we started treating servers like digital community gardens, then:

Local campaigns could run Lemmy or Mastodon spaces
Libraries could host Pixelfed galleries of community art
Climate groups could run Mobilizon for mutual aid and action
Neighbours could share events and info, outside of corporate silos

Oxford needs a server, so does your city. This is a callout – and a call-in, if you’re a sysadmin, activist, student, tinkerer, or just someone who cares about your city and the #openweb, start asking: where’s our server? Let’s build it. Let’s map it. Let’s make the Fediverse a place of places, not just a cloud of abstract URLs. We need to get the #Fediverse out of “nerd island” and into the towns and cities we actually live in.

On the history of the web and Oxford (BBC). Want to help start a #MastodonOxford or similar? Let’s talk. We have the tools. We just need the will.

Programming Mission: Let’s Fix the Fediverse Discovery Gap

UPDATE: On this needed path, let’s try and focus on diversity of codebases. As the is currently too much focus on vertical, #Mastodon is locked into its own trajectory, a closed loop of PR, hierarchy, and “favourites over merit”, so trying to wrestle it into something else is a waste of energy.

The smart path is to let it drift into its own #mainstreaming Fediverse while we work on the #openweb reboot without importing it mess path. The wider challenge is making sure our reboot isn’t just “not Mastodon” but actually functional, grounded, and healthy, with native governance, trust-based collaboration, and the #4opens at the core.

If we’re talking plan, I’d frame it as:

Draw the line – Publicly define what’s “native” openweb culture and what’s toxic carry-over from #geekproblem and #NGOcapture.

Build in public – Open docs, open processes, open code, open governance (#4opens), so trust compounds over time.

Seed alternative centres of gravity – Forge small, working nodes that can federate and interoperate without depending on a single code-base and Dev crew.

Culture over code – Prioritize conviviality, generosity, and horizontal decision-making before feature creep.

Pull people sideways – Attract users and devs who are frustrated with the PR-walled gardens, not by attacking mainstreaming Mastodon but by showing something that feels better to use and be part of.

Oxford Martin School and the Chattering Classes

I made the mistake of going back to an Oxford Martin School event, this time for a talk on “How To Think About AI: A Guide For The Perplexed“. And perplexed they are, but not in the way they think.

Prof. Richard Susskind stood before a room full of white-haired privilege, clutching their free wine and clutching harder to their decaying certainties. Here was the techno-visionary they came to adore, telling them – soothingly – that everything will change, that AI will reshape the world, and that the path ahead is progress… as long as we just keep funding it and believing hard enough.

Susskind seams to be a long-time member of the #deathcult, confidently soft selling the same fantasy that this time, technology will save us. That AI, even though it’s still dumb and unreliable, is just a stepping stone to AGI, to superintelligence, to salvation. That the very market forces and institutions that got us into this mess will be the ones to rescue us. And of course, the audience clapped.

He spoke of risks, only to dismiss them. He nodded at ethics, only to brush past it. He dropped Marx as a flourish, then drifted into musings on AI-built virtual utopias. The whole performance was a flattening of thought, a parade of mainstream assumptions pushed as reassuring insight.

The discussion never left the orbit of privilege, there was a little talk of power, exploitation, and the social damage wrought by these systems, the was passing talk of the soon to torn apart communities by platform logic. Then onto half-baked fluff about “personalisation is only good, get over it,” and market adaptation as the highest concern.

A highlight, and I use that term lightly, was when he fluffed even the basic questions: What is intelligence? What is AI actually doing now? What are we regulating? But it didn’t matter. Because this wasn’t about hard questions. This was about feeding a room of retired professionals exactly what they wanted: the comforting story that they’re still in the loop, still part of the future, still the chosen class, even if only as spectators with signed books.

This is why I stopped going to Oxford Martin School talks a few terms ago. Tonight reminded me why. A dead-end of polite delusion, sipping Chardonnay while the world burns. They don’t want truth. They want reassurance, to believe that tech or economic fixes will save their world, that their system, capitalism, hierarchy, control, just needs a shiny new update. They’re terrified the market won’t adapt, but they’re not afraid of what happens to the rest of us.

This wasn’t a guide for the perplexed, it was a sermon for the faithful. A cult ritual for the mainstreaming elitists, draped in TED Talk syntax and academic credentials. He said nothing. He had to say nothing. Because anything real would crack the façade.

#AI as a capitalist sticking plaster on social and political issues. #Oxford: still good at sounding clever while saying absolutely fuck all.

Empty and successful.

Evangelicals and the hardright

We’re seeing a pattern here in the UK similar to what Kristin Kobes Du Mez maps out in Jesus and John Wayne, the rise of hypermasculine, nationalist evangelical Christianity that’s far more about power than faith. It’s a core part of politics across the Atlantic for decades, and now the same push is happing here in the UK

Oxford city center, well funded free propaganda

In the US, white evangelicals didn’t back Trump despite his obvious corruption and lack of basic Christian values – they backed him because he embodied their real gospel: patriarchal authority, militant nationalism, fear of outsiders, and a fantasy of strongman salvation. Du Mez shows how generations of evangelical pop culture, from John Wayne to Duck Dynasty – laid the cultural foundations for this, replacing the Sermon on the Mount with cowboy swagger and authoritarian power plays.

Now, we’re seeing the UK version of this evangelical hard right mess pushing. Funded by US networks, hardline churches are expanding fast, particularly in working-class and migrant communities. These aren’t your local Church of England vicars or even your average happy-clappy congregations. We’re talking about groups pushing anti-LGBTQ+ agendas, climate denial, strict gender roles, and blind allegiance to state power, often with serious foundation and corporate money behind them.

Groups like Christian Concern, the Alliance Defending Freedom (which has set up shop here), and various Prosperity Gospel outfits linked to US megachurches are growing in political reach. Evangelical academies and ‘leadership training’ institutions are popping up, producing media-savvy influencers and aspiring MPs. The goal? To reshape UK politics around a Christian nationalist vision, just like in the States.

You can already see it in the way culture war rhetoric is creeping into #mainstreaming politics. Attacks on “woke culture,” trans rights, and environmental protections are all increasingly cloaked in moral panic and biblical justification. This isn’t an organic backlash, it’s strategy.

These churches are increasingly aligning with the hard right, providing the “moral” gloss for austerity, nationalism, and climate delay. And like in the US, they present themselves as victims, claiming persecution whenever they’re called out for bigotry and misinformation.

Let’s be very clear, this has little to do with Jesus, and a lot to do with building a new authoritarian consensus under the banner of faith, flag, and fossil fuels. If you want to know where we’re going unless we push back hard, look at the US. The seeds are already here, and they’re being watered with foreign money and feed on homegrown reaction.

A lot of resources are put into this outreach

This is why our response has to go beyond satire and eye-rolling. We need to compost this mess before it can root. Because this isn’t about church or state. It’s about who gets to shape the future, and who gets left out entirely. These people are funded to push the hard right mess in the UK. when you lift the funding lid, this is more about #classwar than “religion”.

Trumpism and the progressive paths to an alternative future

#Oxford

Trumpism and the progressive paths to an alternative future

Reflections from the Rothermere Institute Symposium #Oxford

This recent panel brought together a group of notable scholars – Melinda Cooper (Australian National University), author of Counter-Revolution and Family Values; Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Calvin University), author of Jesus and John Wayne; Joel Suarez (Harvard University), author of Labor of Liberty, forthcoming; and Noam Maggor (Queen Mary University of London), author of Brahmin Capitalism. – to explore the political and moral economy of the Trump Era United States. Their combined analysis is a vivid picture of how we arrived at our current political moment and the limited pathways out of it.

It was a really positive event, what’s striking is how much this conversation resonates not only in the U.S, but globally – particularly in the U.K., where the disintegration of the liberal centre is now fully visible. Over the last decade, we’ve seen the collapse of centrist consensus, leaving voters with a stark binary: hard right or hard left.

The collapse of the centre is leading us to the only way, is hard. In the U.S., when push came to shove, voters turned to the hard right, embodied in Trump and his sprawling ecosystem of grievance, authoritarian populism, and billionaire-backed influence networks. In the U.K., it’s not hard to imagine a similar dynamic emerging in the near future.

Crucially, what’s filling the vacuum left by #neoliberalism is not a return to liberal values. It’s a wholesale political realignment. The liberal centre has, so far, chosen to move toward the “respectable” conservative right, not leftward. Their ideological flight from the left has allowed the far right to become the current primary locus of political imagination.

The question is, will there be a swing to the left? And if so, what kind of left will emerge? Can it be a liberating left, rather than a reactive or technocratic one? Can we imagine a progressive future that is not just a repeat of 20th century social democracy, one that is rooted in new realities, yet grounded in solidarity, care, and the commons?

The neoliberal legacy and the rise of oligarchy. Several speakers traced today’s crisis to the economic architecture of late capitalism. Quantitative Easing (QE), the worship of capital gains, and financial deregulation have created a political economy that favours rentier elitists, tech monopolies, and patriarchal family capitalism. These forces are now shaping politics directly, not just through lobbying, but through ideological control and cultural engineering.

Oil, gas, tech, and finance capital have all converged around a new parasitic oligarchy. This is not the “free market” they pretend to champion, it’s a state-dependent, deeply subsidized regime of asset accumulation. Their “libertarianism” is a mask, when you strip away the rhetoric, you find private capital totally dependent on the state – for subsidies, legal protections, and military-backed global markets. The American right’s political project is to eliminate the centre, cleansing moderate Republicans, capturing courts, weaponizing information systems, and exporting this authoritarian model globally.

Evangelical capitalism: The cultural engine, a key insight from Kristin Kobes Du Mez, is the role of white evangelicalism in this. Far from a sideshow, it forms the emotional and moral backbone of Trumpism. Patriarchal authority, nostalgia, submission to hierarchies, and promises of prosperity through obedience, these values echo through both megachurch sermons and Republican stump speeches.

Multi-level marketing, prosperity gospel, and the language of “blessings” have created a totalizing religious capitalism. It’s self-reinforcing: hard to exit, deeply social, and rooted in fear of the “other.” This is not just religion, it’s political economy, culture, and affect rolled into one. And yes, it’s white evangelicalism as #MLM, it’s a pyramid scam, a con.

Progressive futures are harder than they look, if the right is already moving toward a post-capitalist oligarchy, the left must also imagine post-capitalist futures – but with radically different foundations. Unfortunately, the progressive movement is fragmented, caught between nostalgia for New Deal liberalism and utopian paths with little grounding in material politics.

The chattering classes, policy think tanks, legacy media, technocratic #NGOs still cling to the dream of returning to neoliberal “normalcy”. But this is a dead end. As some panellists noted, even Trump and neoliberalism may not be opposites, but continuations of the same project: one naked, one dressed in civility.

What’s needed now is not a fantasy of restoring the centre, but a real commitment to build something new: grounded in solidarity, regenerative economies, climate realism.

Lessons and questions for the left:

Can progressive movements discipline capital and at a very basic level reengineer markets to serve social goals?
Can we reclaim the state as a tool for collective transformation, or can we do something radically different?
Can we learn from the global South, where post-colonial states have been navigating these contradictions far longer?
And can we build institutions that don’t replicate hierarchy, but still scale power and coordination needed in this globalist mess?

There’s a lesson from history here, progressive eruptions often pull from the past, from older traditions of mutual aid, labour solidarity, cooperative economics, and community defence. We don’t need to invent utopias from scratch, we need to recover the parts that worked, compost the ones that failed, and build with humility and collective care. But we do need to build.

You can support one of these paths https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

#Oxford

Evangelicals and the hardright