So how can people try not to be prats about this conversation?

In alt tech there are lots of people doing good, and they are, but this is blinded shifting to doing “good” head down worshipping the #deathcult, this would be kinda OK if they held the bridge to a wider view of “good” but they don’t, they block and obscure there #blocking, this is bad, very bad as in the end the “good” they say they do, is just more mess we need to compost.

The real solution is always to respect and build from the fluffy/spiky debate, not bury it under politeness or pretend blindly it doesn’t matter. #Fluffy brings empathy, care, and bridge-building – vital social glue. #Spiky brings clarity, honesty, and challenge – the fire that keeps things real. Both are needed if a project is to stay alive and #4opens. The moment one side silences the other, the culture starts to rot. The second-best path, if balance isn’t yet possible, is to shift the #NGO-style fluffy language – soften its domination reflex – so it stops sounding like control disguised as kindness. This is where care can evolve into openness rather than enclosure.

The worst outcome is what we’ve already seen too often: blinded narrowness, the slow creep of civility politics that smothers dissent while smiling at best and ignoring then #blocking at worst. It’s silent damage, and it killed #SocialHub, turning what could have been a commons into a small irrelevant gated forum of insiders. You can’t maintain trust by excluding the spiky voices; you can only maintain a hollow sham.

So how can people try not to be prats about this conversation? Start by listening across difference. Don’t pathologize conflict; compost it. Assume that critique is care, not attack. Drop the impulse to manage or “align” others – those are imperial moves. Instead, nurture space for spikiness within shared trust. The goal isn’t harmony, it’s living balance – a federation of tones, not a choir of compliance.

UPDATE: my feeling and experience of this is that these types of people will with blindness destroy what they say they value for the security of what they say they don’t value. The next generation will likely repeat this mess, and the compost will likely rot, as will our environment because little real change or challenge comes from the narrow blinded path this group push. Yes it’s a hopeless mess, ideas to change and challenge this please?

PS. I would like to be proved wrong, this is a real opportunity for a nice group of people to do the right thing.

Admit the mess – don’t polish it. Stop pretending everything’s fine. The blindness comes from politeness and professionalised façades – people smiling while quietly blocking change. Naming the rot is the first act of care. #4opens starts with open process, not spin.

Reignite the spiky energy. Spikiness is honesty, critique, fire – not aggression. Without that spark, the culture flatlines into #NGO sludge. Invite spiky voices back with trust, not fear. Build cultures that can handle disagreement as fuel, not threat.

Rebuild from affinity, not hierarchy. Instead of “leadership” and “representation,” think federation – small, rooted, overlapping networks of trust. The #OGB model (Open Governance Body) can be a path: shared stewardship, visible processes, no invisible power.

Compost the infective NGOs. Use what’s useful (resources, access, tools) but don’t let them define the frame. Their language and logic are imperial – centralising, sanitising. Translate their “professional” talk into commons language: from “impact metrics” to “shared meaning,” from “alignment” to “affinity.”

Re-root culture in lived practice. The grassroots aren’t a romantic idea – they’re the only working base. Real change comes from where people actually do things together, not from panels or “stakeholder dialogues.” Focus energy there, make it visible, and let legitimacy flow upward again.

Make openness the discipline. Openness isn’t chaos; it’s a discipline of trust. The #4opens – open data, open process, open source, open access – are the anti-imperial charter. If a group can’t work by them, they’re not #openweb; they’re enclosure with good PR.

Keep it #KISS simple. Most of the blindness hides in overcomplication – endless frameworks, metrics, governance layers. Keep it small, human, and understandable. Simplicity keeps power honest.

LIVE at c-base a #fluffy Fediverse conference

It’s been going on for the last few years, let’s look at a current example. Live at c-base is a #Fediverse event that highlights the need for composting the dogmatic #fluffy mess making to keep balance in our shared #openweb reboot. With our #fluffy crew talking about the shared reboot, on the surface it looks positive – friendly conversations, smiles, the right hashtags – but underneath it reveals a deeper problem: there is zero balance at these events. This is the third event I’ve seen with the same issue: the same small group, the same narrow framing, the same blindness. It is not healthy. It is not balanced. And it is not a good path to stay on.

What we are seeing, again and again, is a kind of #blinded #blocking. A narrow circle, reproducing itself, shutting out the very people who dug the digital soil for the seedling stage of the current #Fediverse growth. Sadly, #blindness and #blocking makes these people prats, not because they don’t care, but because they can’t see beyond their narrow bubbles.

Composting the mess, we need to be honest here. We all make messes in movement spaces, and the only way forward is to compost these messes. Composting means breaking down what is toxic, unbalanced, or self-serving and transforming it into nutrients that can grow something better. If we ignore the problem, the mess just piles up until the whole project smells. If we compost it, we can build soil, roots, and future growth.

Where’s the hope? Right now, hope is hard to see in these paths. A purely #fluffy approach – friendly, soft, smiling – is good for atmosphere, but it slides into dogmatic blindness. Fluffy alone does not challenge power. Fluffy alone does not create balance. Fluffy alone does not compost.

What we need is spiky/fluffy. We need the warmth of fluff but also the edge of spike, the courage to challenge, to draw lines, to say when things are going wrong. Without this, we share the same blindness, wrapped in smiles and funding applications. One thing that might explain this narrowness is that we are in the middle of a generation change. The original crew who put real work into growing the #Fediverse in its seedling years are no longer invited, and the real problem is that to this new fluffy crowd the last generation are mostly invisible.

Looking at the Berlin Fedi Day schedule the only person I recognise from that seedling stage, that built the current working reboot is Christine Lemmer-Webber, and they were always firmly within the #NGO-fluffy camp. Everyone else? New faces, from before, like Evan Prodromou who played no role in the atavism of the seedling stage or the people from after ??? Who to often bring the #NGO and funding paths that is at the root of current mess making.

One such event would be understandable. But three in a row? It looks less like an “accident” and more like a PRAT move, hardcoded fork of our shared project. A fork that speaks with arrogance “for all of us” while shutting out the #spiky voices of the community who helped built the current #fedivers path. Towards balance, where do we go from here?

Name the mess: We can’t fix what we won’t face. #blinded #blocking is real, and it needs to be called out. This is what I am doing here.

Compost, don’t cancel: These are not enemies, just our #NGO, #fashionista in need of wider perspective. We don’t waste energy and focus in burning them out; we compost their mess into fuel for growth, they are a part of the debate.

Spiky/Fluffy events: The next gathering should explicitly mix both tendencies. Spikiness to challenge, fluffiness to care. That balance is the only way to keep hope alive, let’s not be prats on this, please.

Reconnect with roots: We need to bring back more of the seedling stage #Fediverse builders and seedling voices, not as nostalgia but as grounding. The roots matter if the tree is to grow.

Expand the circle: No small group should speak for the whole. Open doors, open process, open web. #4opens. A part of this is embedded in the closed funding of these events and process.

Final thought, right now, what we’re watching is real prat behaviour, dressed up in smiles and #NGO funding. That’s a dead end. If we want the #openweb reboot to be more than another hollow fad, we need balance, humility, and compost. The fluffy mess won’t compost itself. That’s our job.

You likely need a shovel #OMN to work on composting. Or if you want to continue with this kind of mess making then clearer naming the events for the minority they invite and host would help to make less mess, a few #NGO groups have started to do this like #FediForum and the #SWF now have less imperialistic language, which is at least is a little less blinded.

#fediday #c-based

It’s Not About You

Who are the #nastyfew?

They are the people who always rise to the top when #mainstreaming takes hold. You see them on TV, in parliament, running #NGOs, managing #dotcons tech projects.

On the surface, they don’t always look bad – in fact, they often present as competent, articulate, even charming. But scratch that surface and the pattern is clear: their drive is not shared flourishing, it’s possession and control.

This minority #nastyfew, from a historical view, are today’s bourgeoisie. Marx outlined (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie), that the bourgeoisie historically gained their power through ownership of the means of production – factories, land, capital – while the working class had nothing but their labour to sell. The bourgeoisie used their control over wealth and coercion to keep society in balance, a balance where they stayed on top and everyone else stayed dependent.

The same dynamic runs through our present, the #nastyfew work to preserve a status quo that serves them. They exploit labour (waged or unwaged), capture resources, and use subtle or blunt coercion to suppress any change or challenge.

Those who hold power – social, technical, financial – remain the #nastyfew unless we actively work to compost them.

Then, in our cultural circles, we have our own “common sense” #blocking, the “parasites” who feed from progressive paths.

#fashernistas – chasing visibility, hashtags, and trends instead of substance. They drain energy by endlessly cycling the latest buzzwords while ignoring the compost underneath.

#Blinded dogmatic liberals – well-meaning perhaps, but so trapped in their own ideology that they block radical change without even seeing it.

The wannabe #nastyfew – those who orbit power, adopting the habits of control in hopes of rising up themselves.

Neo-liberals in disguise – the most dangerous, because they consciously wear the clothing of other paths: climate, diversity, openness… while quietly feeding the #deathcult of enclosure, growth, and control.

Some of these act blindly, reproducing harmful patterns without much thought. Others are deliberate: they know what they’re doing, and they’re doing it to consolidate control.

The unthinking #mainstreaming majority are shadows of the above. They’re not directly malicious, but they absorb the surface story: They repost the slogans. They nod along with “common sense” solutions pushed by the #dotcons and NGOs. They go with the flow, even when the flow is a sewer. Without working composting, they become the mulch for the #nastyfew to grow stronger.

The “nice liberals”. Not all liberals are destructive. Sometimes they play a healthy role: They keep projects afloat by doing practical work. They can mediate between radicals and the #mainstreaming. They often mean well, and can be allies if they’re not left holding the steering wheel all the time. They’re not the compost, they’re more like the worms: sometimes useful, sometimes wriggly, but part of the soil cycle.

And beyond, there are what has value, the progressive radical paths – both #fluffy (trust, care, openness) and #spiky (confrontation, defence, rupture). That’s another layer of the compost pile, and deserves its own focus. The key point: the #nastyfew and their parasites will always try to rise up in any fertile ground. The progressive trick is to compost them early – recycle their energy, block their possessiveness, and keep the soil rich for new seeds.

To recap, let’s look at some history. When the #openweb reboot began about a decade ago, it was rooted in grassroots values: #4opens, federation, collective governance, affinity trust networks. But as soon as the energy started to gather, the #mainstreamin pushed in:

#Dotcons pivoting into the space – Facebook rebranding as “Meta” and trying to swallow the Fediverse through the #Threads/ActivityPub move. This is enclosure dressed up as “openness”.

Standards capture – The #NGO actors increasingly gatekeeper the “neglected” #W3C processes, pushing, more corporate-driven priorities while blocking messy grassroots paths that did the shovelling to grow the reboot during the seedling years.

Control of resources – a few “elitist” individuals began hoarding power over infrastructure, domain names, and repos, reproducing the same top-down model we’re supposed to be escaping.

The result? We are seeing the #mainstreaming channeling energy away from collective growth into more controlled, branded silos. The Fediverse started as messy, small-scale, radical. But the same pattern repeated:

SocialHub degeneration – once the buzzing hub for ActivityPub, it decayed into a handful of blockers. The sometimes competent-and-charming surface masks a deeper instinct for control. Threads stagnate, dissent is suppressed, and the soil turns barren.

Mastodon centralization – while #Mastodon has been vital, its dominance has also let a single dev-team shape the Fediverse “common sense”. That concentration of reputation and technical control looks very much like a wannabe mini-bourgeois class rising.

#NGO incursions – funded NGOs present themselves as allies, but bring managerialism, paywalls thinking, and “stakeholder” logic. Instead of composting conflict, they plaster over it with workshops and careerism. Then #block the people who complain.

This is the #Fediverse version of “workers remain workers, employers remain employers”: contributors remain contributors, gatekeepers remain gatekeepers. We face the issue of possession over collaboration – we see that collectives fracture when individuals cling to admin roles, mailing lists, funds, and leadership positions. Possession rots trust and then groups wither.

The people who hold (and hored) resources, contacts, and media attention become more deadened than path, even if they started with good intentions.

The composting lesson, is that over and over, the #nastyfew and their parasites repeat the bourgeois pattern at scale: They present as competent and charming. They consolidate possession and control. They preserve the status quo by suppressing dissent.

And over and over, the solution is the same: compost them. Turn the piles of #techshit and #NGO mess back into fertile ground. Protect the seeds of grassroots tech trust, keep the social soil messy and alive.

The #OMN is based on
human beings doing the right thing.

And they will not,
and it will fail.

Human beings doing the right thing,
and they will not,
and it will fail.

And they will not,
and it will fail.

And will fail.

This is the challenge
in the era of the #deathcult:
A culture that feeds on fear,
on greed,
on possession.

Seeds are planted,
but the soil is barren.
Trust is offered,
but hands close into fists.
A path is drawn,
but the walkers scatter into shadows.

The #OMN is fragile,
thin green shoots
in a field of ash.

It asks the simplest thing:
Do the right thing.
Not once,
but again,
and again,
and again.

And if we do not?
It will fail.

And if we do?
Perhaps,
seeds will take root,
and grow beyond the compost,
beyond the #deathcult,
into the messy, open,
living forest.

Compost the blocking, keep the seeds alive, and make space for growth

Security comes from community rather than technological control

It turns out that what hackers yearn for is not raw power but security – not just the technical kind, but an emotional security that is harder to admit to, so it gets dressed up in the language and posture of technology.

Because many in these paths and spaces operate with narrow social and political horizons, shaped by individualist tech culture, a distrust of messy collective life, and little grounding in movement history, their insecurity rarely finds healthy expression. Instead, it gets channelled into #mainstreaming patterns: centralising control, hoarding decision-making, gatekeeping access. The feeling of safety comes not from trust, but from control.

This is why in so many “open” projects we see:

Root admin privileges treated like a personal bunker.

Technical gatekeeping replacing collaborative stewardship.

Social disagreements re-coded as “technical issues” so they can be “resolved” by force rather than dialogue.

The power they wield is a symptom, the insecurity is the cause, lack of balance is the disease. The problem is that command/control cultures make insecurity worse, they turn every challenge into a threat, every new contributor into a risk, and every disagreement into a test of dominance. Over time, this drives out the very diversity and collaboration that could create true resilience.

The #4opens – open data, open code, open standards, open process – is not just a governance checklist. It’s a practical, everyday discipline that forces a shift from control to collaboration. It changes the emotional terrain.

Open data dissolves the hoarding instinct, because nothing critical is locked away in one person’s vault.

Open code forces the bunker doors open, making it normal for others to touch “your” work.

Open standards create interdependence rather than dependency, reducing the fear of losing control.

Open process makes decisions visible, accountable, and shared, replacing the hidden backchannel with a transparent commons.

By practising the #4opens, even the most control-driven hacker can start to find a different kind of security, rooted in trust, redundancy, and collective stewardship rather than in solitary power.

The #4opens doesn’t magically fix emotional insecurity, but it creates a scaffolding of transparency and accountability where balance can grow. It turns projects from personal fiefdoms into shared ecosystems, and in doing so, helps people unlearn the reflex to seek safety only through domination.

The way out is not to strip hackers of influence, but to build cultures where influence is exercised in the open, with care, and where security comes from community rather than technological control.

A #fluffy view – Think of a self-hosted community chat platform, something small, privacy-focused, run by a handful of volunteer hackers. The core devs are brilliant, but they see every problem as a technical one: security means encryption upgrades, stability means more containerization, and governance means a GitHub permissions list.

When disagreements arise over moderation, they don’t trust open discussion. Instead, they quietly add admin-only tools that can hide messages or boot users without notice. From their perspective, this is “security”, keeping the platform stable and safe. But because the process is invisible and unilateral, it breeds mistrust. The community feels controlled, not cared for.

Now imagine this same project embracing the #4opens:

Open Data – Moderation actions are logged and visible to everyone.

Open Source – The code that runs moderation tools is public, so no hidden powers exist.

Open Process – Policy changes are discussed in a shared forum where everyone can contribute.

Open Standards – The platform can interoperate with others, so no one is locked in.

This changes the emotional root of the hackers’ insecurity: their “power” no longer depends on guarding the system against imagined chaos, but on participating in a transparent culture where the community itself holds the system together. Security is now mutual care, not technological control. The hackers still have influence, but it’s exercised in the open, grounded in trust, and shared with the people they serve.

A spiky view of this – The problem with too many hackers is that they mistake root access for moral authority. They wrap their emotional fragility in layers of SSH keys and sudo privileges, then strut around acting like benevolent dictators for life. You see it in the endless “code is law” sermons, in the backroom channel decisions, in the smug dismissal of “non-technical” people as if empathy were a bug. They lock down wikis “for security,” gatekeep repos “to avoid chaos,” and implement moderation tools that work like secret police. This is not liberation, it’s digital landlordism, the same power-hoarding rot we see in the #mainstreaming mess, just with a Linux hoodie instead of a corporate badge.

#KISS it’s best not to be either a dogmatic #fluffy or a #spiky prat about this need for balance.

Talking vs. doing in the #openweb

I often hear: “You post a lot, but what practical work have you actually done?” It’s a fair question, there’s far too much hot air in tech spaces, and the #openweb can’t be rebuilt on rhetoric alone. The critique goes something like this:

“You’re preaching an idealised ‘community’ that doesn’t exist. You criticise the mainstream (fair enough) but keep pushing alternatives without showing a tangible model that works. It feels like you’re looking for an audience, not a conversation.”

And here’s my side of this:

I was part of the team that got multiple governments in Europe to adopt the Fediverse — working on the outreach that took the tech to the European Union.

I co-ran 5 Fediverse instances with thousands of users in its early years. We eventually had to shut them down — an experience I now talk about openly because we need to make this work better next time.

I’ve worked on meany of #openweb projects going back to the birth of the WWW. That history is here: https://hamishcampbell.com

Projects include UK #Indymedia, #VisionOnTV, the Open Media Network (#OMN), the #4opens framework, and the #OGB — all aimed at building governance, infrastructure, and culture outside corporate control.

Here’s the crux: building outside the mainstream is messy, fragile, and uncertain. There’s no guarantee that any of this will “win.” But the alternative – doing nothing and letting every commons be enclosed – guarantees failure.

The work is #DIY culture. If you don’t want to build, you don’t have to. But if you do, you have to accept the risk, the mess, and the fact that you won’t get the same dopamine hits as shipping a VC-backed app. You also have to resist the slide into trolling when frustration builds.

The real challenge is cultural: how to support tech that walks outside the dominant paths long enough to make new ones. That means building infrastructure that runs on trust, openness, and care, not just control, profit, and scale. If we stop doing this, every alternative will keep collapsing back into the defaults.

Composting the reboot funding

Dear Michiel,

At this point, it’s hard not to notice a pattern. You’ve received clear, thoughtful proposals aligned with your calls – yet no real engagement, year after year. I’ve said this gently before: your call-out text needs to be composted. If you’re not funding alternative, open, activist infrastructure – just say that. Don’t lead people on.

Look forward to seeing what did get funded – I’ll be writing something on that soon https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=nlnet

A post on why this kind of institutional #geekproblem push needs compost: https://hamishcampbell.com/we-need-to-compost-the-current-culture-of-lying/

Hamish

Not surprised. This is probably the 10th time we’ve applied to the #NLnet / #NGI fund over the years. Just heard back: our proposals for #OGB (Open Governance Body), #indymediaback, and #MakeingHistory were not selected – again.

“We are very sorry that we cannot offer you support for your good efforts.”

Sure, I, appreciate the polite brush-off again. But after so many rejections for solid, urgently needed tech projects that actually fit the funding goals, it’s time to name what’s really going on.

That there’s no #mainstreaming support for grassroots alternative, activist-rooted #openweb infrastructure. These projects aren’t pointless and inoffensive enough, not wrapped in shiny #NGO-speak, and don’t fit the comfy (in)circles of #geekproblem “innovative” funding. But they are native, they are needed, and they work – if you actually want a humane, federated, public-interest net that the funding outreach text says you do.

Time and again, we’re told these projects are “not selected” – Meanwhile, funding continues to flow toward a few good minority projects, a few #mainstreaming #fashernista alt tech projects, but the most goes to, minority interest, academic paths or closed bureaucratic #geekproblem circles, recycling the same stale stack of status quo ideas in slick/pointless packaging.

On balance, this is VERY much not building the #openweb – it’s way too often pushing #NGO and geek hobby paths or building another layer of the #closedweb under a friendlier mask. Yes, the is some small good done with this tech funding, it supports the big #dotcons copying Fediverse projects, no bad thing. But on the question of balance, we can see the lies.

We’re not discouraged. We’re composting this – as ever – into the next push. And yes, we’ll keep applying in till they change the text of the invites, so our projects are not the perfect fit they are now. Not because we believe the system works, but because we need to document the process if it works, well more when it doesn’t work, sadly. Composting lies is a part of the #openweb reboot.

If you do want to support native, trust-based, grassroots tech building, outside the NGO bubble, chip in here: https://opencollective.com/open-media-network or help to make this institutional funding work as it says it does.

A look at this narrow #NGO and #geekproblem point of view

The essence of the #geekproblem is its narrow, self-referential logic. Here’s a #spiky, pointed, prody view of the narrow track of thinking that defines the #geekproblem in the context of an #openweb reboot:

“There is no Emperor, King, or Priest in the Fediverse’s feudalism.”

The illusion is that it’s all flat – no power structures, just pure meritocracy. If you’re already a priest or acolyte, there’s no need to ask. You just do:

Want a new app? Code it.
Want a new protocol? Spec and ship it.
Want a new UX? Design it and deploy.

And if you can’t do it yourself? Then you kneel before the alternative establishment and pray.
Or, as they prefer to say, advocate.

This is both a critique of the (hidden) hierarchies and a mirror held up to the myths of autonomy and openness in the current #Fediverse culture. There’s a real power structure – it just doesn’t wear a crown, but if you look it’s VERY visible, people choose not to look, this is the #techshit mess we make and need to balance with healthy grassroots composting.

What would a #fluffy view of this look like?

Can people engage with #4opens process?

The #4opens is a completely obverse social restating of the #FOSS development model, but with a critical edition: The return of #openprocess, something we’ve lost over the last 10 years due to the shift from public email archives to our reliance on encrypted chat.

With this in mind, what is still #blocking the #openweb reboot? One thing I’ve learned from the last five years of this reboot is this: The #geekproblem is inadequate for the scale of change and challenge we face. Currently, the #geekproblem is HARD #blocking, obstructing both, funding, and tech direction. Think: #NLNet, #NGIZero, #SummerOfProtocols, #InvestInOpen, they say the right words, have potential, but are actually #blindly caught in a loop of the same limiting #blocking patterns.

This is why we need activism, this can be #spiky, sometimes all it takes Is a rock or a stick. Think of Greek shepherd dogs in the mountains, they come at you like wolves. But just bending down to pick up a rock or stick? They back off. No violence. Just clarity and intention. Think of the #4opens like this when facing #mainstreaming, suddenly, it starts to make sense.

Nuts and nutters, Yes ]- you’re right, this can sound like blinded ideology. But remember: Humans are meaning-creating creatures. One word for that is ideology – there are others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synonym

If we can compost this mess, that’s a big if, will the #OMN Work? Simple answer: Yes.
Complex answer: No. My answer to that riddle? We find the complex by implementing the simple. That’s the #KISS principle in action. Walk the simple path, we discover our way through the complex path by implementing and walking the simple #KISS.

#Mainstreaming = #Deathcult Worship

Most mainstream agendas are pointless. Why? Because they’re built on “common sense”. Which today often just means #deathcult worship. Something to keep in mind… whenever you’re doing anything that matters. Hope this slight poetry piece helps. One thing I keep saying, please don’t be a prat, thanks.

Open vs Closed Security: Finding a Path

In a world where digital activism is all surveilled, we need to understand better the balance between open and closed security. If you’re doing anything politically sensitive or “#spiky,” the safest option is to organize offline. Government analysts, corporate spies, and bad actors easily map connections inside the #dotcons and gather intel through the #openweb.

The challenge is that, while secure communication tools exist, relying on them requires an almost impossible level of tech literacy and trust. Maybe 0.001% of people can confidently lock down their systems, but the remaining 99.99% can’t, or won’t. And even for the most tech-savvy, there’s always the risk of compromised firmware, backdoors, or people error.

Historically, the danger isn’t just theoretical. Police spies have infiltrated activist circles for decades, as detailed in resources like Police Spies Out of Lives. Activists who relied on #closedsecurity were often devastated when trusted comrades turned out to be state agents, the real-world equivalent of someone copying and pasting your encrypted chat to their handlers. Worse still, for every state spy, there are likely ten corporate or private agency spies, each with their own motivations.

From a social point of view the #geekproblem path to perfect privacy is an illusion. So where does that leave us? The truth is, there’s no hard tech fix to human social networking. Tools can help, but social solutions are much more vital. If you are on the #fluffy path or only on the edge of #spiky, working openly and embracing the #4opens model can mitigate harm by removing secrecy as a vulnerability. If there are few secrets to steal, spies lose much of their power.

At the same time, digital skills are essential. People, especially current generations, are organizing online, and the line between online and offline is non-existent to them. Telling them to “just organize offline” will likely get you a dismissive “OK boomer” in response. But just with the police spy history, there will be a cost to people who dismiss this history, we do need to understand better both the possibilities and the risks.

The goal, then, isn’t to choose between open or closed security, but to build a hybrid path. Use the #openweb to find each other and share public information. Use secure tools for truly private discussions, but with the awareness that no tool is socially foolproof. And most importantly, build strong social bonds and resilient offline communities, because, in the end, trust is the only real valuable security layer we have.

Let’s embrace the mess, recognize the dangers, and navigate this landscape with care.

#openweb #4opens #security #privacy #activism #digitalresilience

Social Media Monitoring, data scraping

In a #4opens project like the #Fediverse, this article’s framing makes no sense as a native view of the #openweb. The data exists in a commons, and while you could apply a #CC licence and try to enforce it. In the end, #4opens is just that, #opendata. But as the article highlights, there are real issues in understanding how open systems intersect with state and corporate surveillance.

Fediverse & Mass Surveillance — A research article breaks down how the Fediverse presents both challenges and opportunities for state surveillance.
🔗 Read the research

"Non-centralized social media appears to be undergoing a 'Killer Hype Cycle,' where users dissatisfied with centralized platforms flock to alternatives like Mastodon. But with this influx comes an increase in publicly available data for researchers, corporations, and state agents alike."

The reality is the normal #mainstreaming #dotcons issues that:

Corporations mine federated media for profit.
State agencies catalog user data for tracking and control.

This is a reminder that you are doing anything #spiky political it’s much better to organise off the internet as government analysts easily search and map connections between people using metadata across the #openweb as much as they already do more directly through the #dotcons

This isn’t a #ecryptionist call to lock down the #Fediverse, that would be beyond stupid, but a reminder that openness requires awareness and collective defence. A truly #openweb using the #4opens needs to face these threats head-on, with social solutions and federated resilience at the core of its path and design.

Security and trust are a part of the fluffy/spiky debate in activism

Signal-to-noise is a hard conversation

Signal-to-noise is a hard conversation to have. In our #postmodern world, the very idea of common agreement on what constitutes signal or noise feels elusive, even when it’s often obvious to the community.

The undermining of shared narratives fractured our sense of collective reality. In the absence of common ground, every perspective risks becoming its own echo chamber, amplifying what it values as signal while dismissing conflicting views as noise. This dynamic plays out in countless social and political spaces, shaping how movements grow or fracture.

Take the #climatecrisis: for decades, scientists have raised alarms, presenting real evidence of human-driven climate change. To the scientific community, this is pure signal – an urgent call to action. Yet, in the polluted information ecosystem of #dotcons social media, this signal is drowned by noise: conspiracy theories, corporate disinformation, and nihilistic fatalism. The noise isn’t random; it’s cultivated to create doubt, intentionally distorting the clarity of the signal.

In activist communities, the tension between signal and noise surfaces as the #fluffy vs #spiky debate. The push for kindness and inclusivity (#fluffy) is valuable, but when weaponized to silence critique and #block hard conversations, it becomes noise that stifles necessary friction. Conversely, sharp, uncompromising confrontation (#spiky) can cut through noise to deliver a clear message, but this is too easy to #block, by “common sense” dogmatism and can also all too easily tip into performative aggression and endless infighting, it drowns the original signal in static.

The same dynamic unfolds in the traditional politics. Movements like Black Lives Matter or Palestinian solidarity campaigns face relentless attempts to distort their message. The core signal, calls for justice, equality, and liberation, gets obscured by deliberate noise: fearmongering narratives, tokenizing gestures from corporations, or bad-faith actors hijacking discussions to sow division.

Yet, communities have an intuitive sense of what is and isn’t noise. They might not always agree on the edges, but collective experience and shared values act as a compass. The challenge is in cultivating enough trust to navigate that together, to hold space for disagreement without succumbing to the paralysis of endless debate or the allure of easy scapegoats.

In the end, the conversation itself is part of the signal. The flows of discussion, the messiness of negotiating meaning, and the work of collective sense-making, all of this generates the compost from which new understandings can grow. But that only works if we resist the temptation to #block, dismiss, or isolate ourselves entirely.

The goal isn’t to eliminate noise (an impossible task) but to build resilient communities that can amplify signal through the static. Because in a world where everything is contested, the most powerful act is to keep listening, keep speaking, and keep tending the roots of shared meaning.

#KISS

NOTE, we failed here

Keeping Conversation’s useful, with the Fluffy-Spiky Debate

In activist spaces and grassroots communities, the tension between #fluffy and #spiky approaches is a well-worn. Fluffy represents a gentler, consensus-driven path, centred on kindness, inclusion, and collective care. Spiky, on the other hand, is sharp-edged, direct, and confrontational, willing to disrupt and break things to push for change. Both paths have their place, but the trouble arises when fluffy turns dogmatic, morphing into a hard passive-aggressive policing #blocking that silences dissent.

Dogmatic fluffy presents itself as kindness, but when it becomes rigid, it is just as destructive as unchecked aggression. People get shamed for stepping out of line, challenging dominant group norms, and advocating for more assertive tactics. This isn’t only a theoretical issue, it actively fractures movements, creating echo chambers where only approved, safe opinions are allowed to circulate. It’s activism dressed in softness but wielding the same #mainstreaming blunt force as actual systems we set out to dismantle.

The danger lies in the #blocking of paths to meaningful discussion. When conversations are shut down in the name of maintaining harmony, we lose the ability to take difficult paths. The fluffy-spiky debate needs to be dynamic, a living exploration of what tactics are effective in different contexts. Sometimes, gentle community building is the answer. Other times, the situation calls for confrontation and disruption. But when any side forcibly silences the other, we stop evolving.

It’s good to remember #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Complexity is necessary, but so is cutting through the noise. If our movements become bogged down in internal purity tests, we soon lose sight of the actual struggle. With, people stepping away from the #dotcons and looking for alternatives. We need to offer spaces where messy, honest, and sometimes uncomfortable conversations can happen, not sterilized bubbles where dissent is treated as betrayal. In this, people who push only the personal over the political are not helping.

Real movements thrive in the tension between fluffy and spiky. They feed off the flexibility, to let people navigate those paths without turning them into dead-ends. Fluffy doesn’t need to fear spiky, and spiky doesn’t need to dismiss fluffy. They’re both tools, both necessary. And if we can hold space for that complexity, we might just build movements resilient enough to withstand whatever the #deathcult throws our way.

What do you think? Should we lean into the discomfort and keep the debate alive?

UPDATE: it needs to be said that #blinded dogmatic #fluffy people can become nasty #fuckwits without a clue, in this they are blinded #spiky, what do you think we can do with this mess?

When doors to dialogue slam shut, people look for other ways to be heard

Let’s look at some history of protest, with the crackdown on #XR’s peaceful, #fluffy protests, it’s no surprise that movements are moving into stronger, more disruptive actions. When one path to change is systematically #blocked, history shows that movements turn too #spiky, and we’re already seeing this shift. Recent events, like the symbolic damage by Oxford University by the Palestine Action group, or climate activists turning to sabotage, signal a new phase in the fight for justice and survival.

This escalation isn’t happening in isolation. It’s the predictable result of a systematic refusal to listen to those calling for change. People lose faith in liberal symbolic demonstrations as the #deathcult of #neoliberalism marches on, indifferent to the destruction in its wake. When doors to dialogue are slammed shut, people look for other ways to be heard.

Universities should be at the forefront of this conversation, providing space for genuine debate on how change happens, not just as an abstract academic exercise, but as a living, breathing discussion that acknowledges the urgency of the current mess. We need to break out of the cycle of blinded performative process and confront the reality that people will not quietly watch the world burn.

The #KISS path reminds us to keep things simple: listen to people, understand the roots of their motivations, and create pathways for meaningful action. Otherwise, as we’re already seeing, the pressure will keep building — and the cracks in the system will only grow wider.

To find my wider view on university’s role in this

The Said Business School is a temple of the #deathcult

One thing to keep in mind is that these people largely think they are good people, doing the best they can in the world as it is. And will become upset and very #spiky defensive when pointing at them on their knees prostrate worshipping. Like they said in the seminar, “I don’t know what to do about this”. I don’t think most of us do.

The Clarendon Lectures 2025 – Designing the Future: Multidisciplinary perspectives on designing better futures

Systems thinking challenges traditional approaches to management research and practice. In this second Clarendon event, Tima Bansal engages in conversation with academics in #Oxford who are integrating research and practice with the ambition to co-create futures rather than simply analysing solutions.

An outsider, polemical look at this event: Most university panels have a #NGO-thinking academic for process box-ticking. This is the representation of the fluffy side of #mainstreaming social change. This lettuce person is at best a #fluffy careerist and at worst a #NGO parasite. If there is any content at all, it’s box-ticking to create the illusion of consent and goodwill.

Then the meat of the business school is the worship of the #deathcult — people climbing the gravestones of hierarchy in the shiny, crumbling mausoleums. Even then, it’s mostly careerist. This one is talking about embedding in more fluffy NGO groups to build their story. It’s all about community and relationships. She lets go of the ego she pushed first, to step back to embed. No idea what the outcome of her work is — it’s all process. She ends with a call for nature and holism, the world her work destroys.

The currency is theory; on this, the business school is completely bankrupt from an academic point of view — not to get into the subject of morals, let alone basic human survival. She says they push their content out into science journalism, as these people are not able to judge the value of abstract academic work.

The next is an accounting bureaucrat, who does mention the green limits. He touches on the real and talks about the language in documents of bureaucratic regulation. He says it’s a mess and doesn’t know what to do. Trusting what companies say is not going to be enough. You need to change the economic relationships, and changing this is very difficult — and it’s currently simply not working.

The summing-up person is excited with an issue? Not sure what — no idea what she is actually saying. She is back to not talking about anything. She touches on statues and embarrassment. Finally, she asks an interesting question: who is the ordinance, us or somebody else? We have no idea who?

She says we need strong institutions, as individual companies are not going to do it — they capture the levers of power and pull them to keep the mess, and money, flowing. She has no answer to this. She does mention moving past “markets” in passing for a moment.

Boundaries come up — the answer is fluff, then more substance, accounting has hard boundaries, but useful change comes from stepping outside this. Systems thinking — no answer.

These people are lost and are training up the next lost generation. It’s interesting to see that they have some understanding of this, but it’s looking like they will do nothing to change it.

Wine and nibbles were OK.

Talked to many of them after the event. A few said they were undercover academic “radicals” infiltrating the business colleges — which was maybe a tiny bit true, or not. The students I talked to were blank and staying in academia.

The “consultants” were interested and animated; they found it a little shockingly invigorating to have a counter-culture conversation.

To sum up, mostly hopeless. I am always surprised the place doesn’t stink of rotting zombies, a metaphor, maybe? They need some real content… they really need some real content, but you get the strong feeling that they are not even going to change until the Thames is flowing up under the nearby railway bridge. Even then, there will be calls for more sandbags while talking more about careers — all they know — but underneath this, they have the fear that these careers will likely not exist.

This is it. What to do?

It’s a bleak cycle: academics pump out theory to feed the chatting classes, who in turn guide the #fashernista, spinning ever more refined justifications for the status quo. The echo chamber reverberates with hollow soundbites while the world burns. What we end up with is a layer of intellectual manure, with no one doing the work to turn it into compost.

With projects like the #OMN social tech could be the spade that digs through this mess, breaking down the dead ideas and aerating the soil for something new to grow. But instead, we use #dotcons tech to pile up more waste. Every app, platform, and algorithm is designed to reinforce the system, not break it. The closed loops of influence, profit, and prestige just churn on.

If we want to prod this beast, one way I am working on is to embrace the disruptive potential of the #openweb. What if we built platforms that exposed the rot? Imagine public academic review systems where research couldn’t hide behind paywalls, or tools that tracked the influence of corporate funding on “objective” scholarship. There are some seeds for this, what if we grow them #4opens

Or more direct action, maybe we just crash the garden party. What if we hijacked their panels, flooded their Q&As with real questions, or set up rogue alt-conferences right outside their events? The goal isn’t destruction for destruction’s sake — it’s breaking the illusion of inevitability.

What do you think? How do we spark that shift in behaviour, that even they, softly, say we need to do.

#Oxford

UPDATE: If this #fluffy path is #blocked then people will turn #spiky as we are already seeing happening https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/24973861.oxford-university-palestine-action-group-admits-vandalising-building/ and https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/08/a-new-phase-why-climate-activists-are-turning-to-sabotage-instead-of-protest we need a real debate in the university about how change comes about #KISS