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

OMN: Broken Institutions, and the Need to Rebuild the Commons

For progressive and radical people, one of the central political questions of our time is simple to ask but hard to answer – Why is it so difficult to rebuild the institutions that were destroyed in our #deathcult worship of the 1980s and 1990s? And more importantly why does the impossibility of rebuilding them make it so hard to change the needed balance of power in society? These question matters for working on the future of the society and most importantly the grassroots part of this: #openweb, grassroots media, and projects like #OMN.

The hollowing out of institutions, in the 20th century, politics used to be deeply institutional. People didn’t just express opinions, they joined organisations. If you marched in a protest, we usually marched as a member of something: a trade union, a political party, a civil rights organisation or community association. These organisations formed the infrastructure of democracy, connecting everyday anger and hope to real power.

But beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, much of this infrastructure was deliberately dismantled. Union power was broken, mass political parties were hollowed out, and community organisations lost resources and influence. The result is the political landscape we inherit, a society with political anger but without any working political structures.

Today we live in what #fashionistas and academics call #hyperpolitics or what I call #stupidindividualism in the hashtag story. Yes, some people are more politically engaged than they were in the 1990s or early 2000s: More fluffy protests, #dotcons online political discussion. But this engagement is almost all unstructured in the old sense.

Millions may join a protest or share a political message in the #dotcons, yet very little, if any lasting organisation emerges from this. This surface engagement creates a strange paradox of huge drifting mobilisations leading to very little structural change. We can have the largest protests in history – yet the underlying power structures remain completely untouched.

Closed #dotcons social media lowered the cost of expression, but algorithmically shaped it into smoke and mirrors. Let’s take a moment to lift the lid on this #tecsit mess. The role of media in this is complex, on the positive side, #closedweb platforms drastically reduced the cost of political expression.

Forty years ago, if you wanted to express a political opinion publicly you needed a newspaper, radio station, a public meeting or to stand in a square shouting. Now you can reach thousands of people instantly. But there is a downside that #dotcons smoke and mirror online engagement replaces the slow work of institution-building. Posting, sharing, and reacting can feel like participation, but it has very little role in building the durable structures needed for any long-term change.

So why do the current hard right succeed without institutions? There is an uncomfortable asymmetry between left and right. The right can carry out its agenda without building mass organisations, because it relys on: existing elitist power structures, wealthy donors, state institutions and traditional corporate media.

The left cannot rely on these, historically the left needed mass organisations because its power came from collective action – workers, communities, movements. Without those structures, left politics becomes, mess, fragmented and reactive. This is why protest waves can be enormous but still fail to shift any real policy.

The #undeadleft problem is where vertical left respond to this crisis with nostalgia, there imagination stops at rebuilding the mass political parties and institutions of the 20th century. But this is to often like trying to animate a corpse, even if you could recreate it, the environment has changed so much that it wouldn’t survive.

At the same time, the opposite response – abandoning institutions entirely to relying purely on digital networks – also fails. Purely online movements often dissolve as quickly as they form. We need a #DIY hybrid path based on federated #4opens institutions like the tools we are building and rebooting with the #OMN projects.

Not rigid old institutions, not purely online networks, But something that seeds the in between. The goal is not to create another platform, it is to expand #federated #p2p infrastructure for collective media and collective politics. The original #openweb worked because it supported networks of communities, independent publishers and grassroots movements. The corporate #dotcons replaced this with extractive platforms designed for profit and control.

KISS rebuilding the commons means rebuilding the social infrastructure of media, not just tools, but institutions and practices that persist to allow collective voices to organise and persist.

The simple truth, if we want real political change, we cannot rely on viral posts, temporary movements or algorithmic attention. We need structures that last, connect people, that can turn energy into horizontal power. That work is slow, messy, and unfashionable, but like digging compost for a garden, it’s the only way anything grows.

A path to start to compost this #techshit is growing horizontal tools from the Fediverse for real change (#OMN).

If the problem of our time is political energy without institutions, then the opportunity is clear:
build new institutions native to the #openweb. Not simply recreate the rigid organisations of the 20th century, and not fall into the hollow performative politics of the #dotcons. Instead, we grow native horizontal digital tools to help people organise, coordinate, and act collectively. This is where the Fediverse and projects like #OMN matter.

The #Fediverse already proves that distributed infrastructure works. But right now it is mostly used for conversation. If we want meaningful change and challenge, we need to extend it into practical coordination and collective action. by build tools for organising, not just talking

Current social media tools are built for attention and engagement, not organisation. What we need to add to the mix is simple #4opens tools that help people form groups, coordinate action, share resources, document activity and most importantly maintain continuity over time (#makinghistory). The Fediverse already has #fashionista and #geekproblem pieces of this:

Mastodon / Pleroma → conversation

Mobilizon → events and gatherings

PeerTube → video publishing

PixelFed → visual storytelling

Lemmy / Kbin → community forums

These existing pieces can become seeds to be woven together into workflows for collective action. On this path we need to remember the goal is not more platforms, it’s practical ecosystems. For this to work a first step is rebuilding commons-based media. A core idea behind #OMN is returning to something like the #Indymedia publishing model, but rebuilt using modern federated tools. Instead of a single website, imagine distributed publishing nodes where local groups post reports, media is shared across networks, discussions happen across servers and archives remain accessible and most importantly meaningful.

This builds collective memory, something the algorithmic feeds of the #dotcons constantly destroy. Movements need memory to learn.

#makinghistory is the same code-base as this grassroots media project

One reason mass organisations collapsed is that participation became too heavy, people don’t want to “join a church” politically any more. So tools should allow different levels of engagement: casual participation, occasional contribution, active organising with core stewardship. The Fediverse naturally supports this because it allows loose affiliation rather than rigid membership. You don’t need permission from a central authority to participate.

Focus on infrastructure, not branding. A common #NGO trap in activist tech is building new branded platforms that compete with existing networks. That approach usually fails. The better path is infrastructure building based on protocols instead of platforms for #4opens interoperability instead of silos, tools that connect existing communities. This was the original power of the #openweb, protocols scale. Platforms capture.

Keep the tech simple (#KISS), as the biggest barrier to grassroots technology is complexity. Many promising projects fail because they become too technical for real communities to use. So the rule should always be KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Tools should be installable easily, understandable by non-geeks and maintainable by small communities to grow resilience without large funding. If only developers can run the system, it will never become a movement infrastructure.

Compost the failures (#techshit). Another key idea is recognising that the tech world constantly churns useful waste. Old tools, failed platforms, abandoned code, all of this is #techshit that can be composted instead of chasing fashionable new tech, we reuse working ideas, simplify existing tools to combine proven approaches. The #openweb already solved many of these problems decades ago. Sometimes progress means going back to what worked.

Build trust networks, as the most important layer isn’t technical – it’s social. Horizontal networks only function when there is trust and shared culture. The Fediverse works because communities can federate with trusted peers, block hostile actors, build local norms. This allows networks to remain open but resilient. The challenge is nurturing communities of practice around the tools.

Grow slowly and organically, movements that scale too quickly often collapse. The better model is ecological growth with small nodes → connected networks → resilient ecosystems. Just like compost turning into soil. The goal is not explosive growth, its sustainable infrastructure for collective action.

The real challenge is the biggest obstacle isn’t technology, it’s the #geekproblem – the gap between technical culture and social reality. Too many tech projects assume that better tools automatically produce social change, but tools only matter when they are embedded in real communities and struggles. The work of projects like #OMN is bridging that gap.

Shovels, not silver bullets, we don’t need magic platforms, we need shovels, tools that help people dig, build, connect, and organise together on the native #openweb. If we can do that, the Fediverse becomes more than an alternative social network, it becomes infrastructure for democratic power.

What projects like #OMN can learn from history

Shovels, Hashtags, and Revolutions: Roots of the #openweb

It’s obvious to everyone paying attention that the relentless push of #mainstreaming over the last forty years has not made society healthier or more stable. Quite the opposite, the result has been accelerating social disintegration and the rapid expansion of #climatechaos.

When the current trajectory continues, the consequences are catastrophic. Over the next fifty years we are looking at millions dead and billions displaced by climate breakdown, ecological collapse, and the political instability that follows. Flooded cities, failing agriculture, collapsing states, mass migration, these are no longer speculative futures. They are already visible on the horizon.

What makes this situation so disturbing is not ignorance. For the last decade, the consequences have been very clear. Climate science, ecological data, and lived experience have converged into a single message, that the system driving this crisis cannot continue. Yet those with the power to change course continue pushing the same policies, the same economic logic, and the same institutional inertia that produced the crisis in the first place.

This is not simply failure, it is knowing failure. And that raises an uncomfortable question of when does systemic negligence become a crime? For forty years the dominant ideology has been the worship of endless growth, deregulation, privatization, and extraction – what many people now recognize as the #DeathCult of #neoliberalism. On this path, ecosystems are treated as expendable, communities are hollowed out, and public institutions are dismantled in the name of “efficiency”.

The result is the hollowing-out of social structures and the destabilization of the planet itself. This isn’t an accident, the evidence has been overwhelming for decades. From early climate warnings in the 1980s to the now constant stream of scientific reports and disasters, we have known were this path leads. And yet the machine keeps running.

At some point we have to confront the idea that what we are witnessing is not just bad policy but something closer to systemic criminality. When leaders, corporations, and institutions knowingly pursue actions that will cause mass death and displacement, we enter the territory of #CrimeAgainstHumanity. The historical analogy that needs resurfacing is Nuremberg.

After the Second World War, the world established that individuals in positions of power could be held legally responsible for crimes that harmed humanity as a whole. The principle was simple: “just following the system” is not a defence. Today we face a different kind of global crime – slower, more bureaucratic, wrapped in economic language – but far larger in scale.

If millions die and billions are displaced because decision-makers continued destructive policies long after the dangers are clear, then if social democracy survives, future generations will have every reason to enforce people as accountable? This is not about vengeance, it’s about accountability and the possibility of changing course before the worst outcomes arrive.

The tragedy is that alongside this destructive path there have always been alternatives – social, technological, and cultural. Grassroots networks, commons-based governance, cooperative systems, and the original ideals of the #openweb all point toward more resilient and humane ways of organising society. But these paths have been buried under forty years of blinded #mainstreaming, where every institution, including our own #NGO people, force alignment with this narrow economic logic.

Digging out of this mess requires more than better technology or better policy papers, it requires collective action, memory, and courage. In other words: Shovels. Hashtags. And revolutions. Because the first step in changing the future is digging up the truth about how we got here.

#OMN #techshit #compost

Public Money, Private Hype: From Blockchain to AI – and the #FOSS Path Less Taken

In tech funding, over the last decade, the #EU poured hundreds of millions of euros into the #blockchain mess. The promise has proven to be illusion, we built no working transformation: trustless systems, frictionless governance or new economic layers for Europe. The reality? By any honest social metric, 99.9% of that public funding was poured straight down the drain.

Now we are lining up to do the same with AI. Another wave of hundreds of millions, based on another cycle of hype, feeding frenzy for consultants, startups, and policy conferences. And if we are realistic, 99% of this funding will follow the same path: absorbed into closed, corporate-driven ecosystems with minimal public return, poured down the drain.

In between these two hype cycles, we invested comparatively little in the #openweb and #FOSS. And yet that is where we actually saw meaningful results. Even if we are conservative and say 70% of public funding for #openweb and Free and Open Source Software was wasted, that still leaves 30% that worked. Thirty percent that built tools people use. Thirty percent that created infrastructure that continues to function. Thirty percent that delivered measurable social good.

Compared to less than 0.001% meaningful return from blockchain projects (and that’s being generous), and perhaps 1% from AI funding (also generous), this is an extraordinary success rate. So why aren’t we talking more about this?

The Pattern: Funding the Closed, Ignoring the Commons

The problem is not technology, it’s political economy. Public money is repeatedly funnelled into closed ecosystems. #Blockchain projects were built around proprietary platforms, based on financialisation. They all failed to deliver public infrastructure, most were simply vehicles for extraction.

#AI is following the same pattern. Instead of building public infrastructure rooted in openness, transparency, and shared governance, we are too often simply subsidising closed models and corporate consolidation. The result will be the same: dependency, vendor lock-in, and very little democratic control.

Meanwhile, the #4opens and #FOSS quietly power the world.

Servers run on open-source operating systems.
The web runs on open protocols.
Community platforms run on federated code.
Critical infrastructure depends on open libraries.

And yet funding for these projects remains very marginal, precarious, and treated, if at all, as an afterthought.

Why This Matters

This is not only about waste, it is about direction. We are living in an era of climate breakdown, democratic fragility, and accelerating inequality. Public investment needs to strengthen commons-based infrastructure, not deepen dependency on mess of speculative and corporate-controlled #dotcons. When we fund the #fashionista hype cycles we increase centralisation, reduce public oversight and lock ourselves into closed ecosystems, which hollow out our needed local capacity.

When we fund #openweb and #FOSS we build shared infrastructure, increase resilience, enable local innovation to create tools that can be forked, adapted, and reused. Even a poor 30% success rate in commons-based funding creates compounding social value. Code written once can be reused globally. Infrastructure built openly becomes a foundation others can extend. Knowledge stays in the public sphere.

Closed projects don’t compound in the same way. They expire, pivot, get acquired, and then disappear behind paywalls.

The Incentive Problem

So why does this mess keep happening? Because hype is easier to support than maintenance. The current #mainstreaming is to blind, Blockchain and AI come with glossy narratives of disruption and geopolitical competition. They promise growth, dominance, strategic autonomy. They flatter policymakers with the illusion of being at the frontier.

The #openweb and #FOSS, by contrast, are mundane. They are about maintenance, collaboration, and long-term stewardship. They don’t produce any unicorn valuations, the smoke and mirrors that feed splashy policy headlines. But they work, and in public policy, “working” should be the gold standard.

What We Need to Talk About

We need to keep asking direct #spiky questions about what percentage of publicly funded tech projects remain usable five years later? How many are open, forkable, and independently maintainable? Who owns the infrastructure we are building with public money? And does this investment strengthen the commons or subsidise enclosure? If we measured blockchain funding by long-term public utility, it would be exposed as a massive misallocation at best and fraud at worst. If we measure AI funding the same way in five years, we may reach the same conclusion. We #KISS need structural change:

Default to #4opens – Public funding #KISS should require open licenses, open standards, and transparent governance.
Fund Maintenance – Not just #fashionista projects, but long-term stewardship of critical open infrastructure.
Measure Social Value – Not hype, not valuation, not patents, but actual public use and resilience.
Grassroots tech as seedlings – to be open to real change and challenge in tech.
Support Commons Governance – Fund communities, not more startups.

Why We Need to Act

If we do not challenge the current messy #techshit cycle, we keep pushing ourselves into a future defined by the #dotcons, closed platforms with extractive models. To say this is not anti-technology, it is pro-public infrastructure. The choice is simple, do we keep pouring public money into, closed ecosystems with near-zero public return or invest systematically in the messy, imperfect, but functioning #openweb commons.

The data – even by generous estimates – is clear. Thirty percent real return beats 0.001% every time. We need to stop funding hype, we need to fund what works, and we need to say this loudly, before the next billion euros disappears down the same drain.

Who’s Building the #Openweb – and Who’s Just Feeding Off It

Almost all funding in the #openweb space gets absorbed by the mediation layer – the people and organisations who talk about, manage, and frame the work rather than doing it. Some money reaches (#geekproblem) developers. Some supports visible projects and #fashionista careers. But the pattern holds: funding flows to what institutions can understand, and institutions rarely understand messy, unglamorous, day-to-day grassroots work.

So resources pile up around reports, events, strategy documents, coordination roles, and polished narratives – while the people actually running infrastructure, holding small communities together, and doing the labour that sustains the #openweb go unfunded. That’s not usually corruption, it’s structural. Institutions fund what they can measure and present. What they can measure and present is almost never the soil layer.

The result is a widening gap between the #fashionista story of the #openweb and the lived reality of it. More funding grows blinded narratives faster than it grows anything real. The question isn’t just “more money”, it’s how do we get resources to the people actually doing the work?

That’s why strong words matter. Naming parasites gives people who are currently being parasitic a chance to stop. Naming #techshit gives people making it a chance to compost their own mess. If they take that chance, good – a kindness has been done. If they don’t, we compost the mess ourselves and grow something better. #KISS.

“Impossible” Is a Political Word

Slavery abolition was impossible. Universal suffrage was impossible. Worker self-organisation was impossible. An open global communications network outside state control was impossible. Until people acted as if it weren’t.

Calling something impossible is usually political – a way of narrowing imagination and disciplining ambition, keeping demands within what existing power structures can tolerate. Structural shifts rarely begin as reasonable proposals. They begin as overreach. Commons infrastructure, resisting enclosure, building beyond scarcity logic – none of this looks feasible from inside the incentive structures it’s trying to replace.

If we only aim for what seems immediately achievable, we are reinforce existing incentives. If we aim beyond them, we shift the terrain. We may not reach the impossible goal, but we change what becomes possible next. That’s not utopianism. Historically, it’s actually #KISS and it’s how boundaries move.

Open Spaces Attract Parasites. That’s Ecology.

The #openweb generates real value: code, trust, collaboration, legitimacy, cultural capital. None of it is stable without maintenance. When drift sets in, someone has to shovel. That work is messy, exhausting, unpaid, and constant – because digital commons produce nutrients, and institutional actors are trained to harvest nutrients. If nobody composts the shit, the project chokes.

The “parasite class” in tech isn’t made up of evil masterminds. They tend to be institutional, NGO-aligned, career-professional actors who attach themselves to commons projects and redirect energy toward grant cycles, brand positioning, and compliance governance. They don’t build the soil. They feed on it. And they usually don’t know they’re doing it.

The most common parasite logic is digital scarcity: “everyone should pay their way.” It sounds responsible. It sounds sustainable. It’s also a direct import from market ideology. Digital infrastructure is non-rivalrous – it can be shared at near-zero marginal cost. But scarcity gets reintroduced through subscriptions, premium tiers, paywalled features, SaaS dependency, and professional gatekeeping. That’s enclosure wearing a cardigan. It’s not building commons, it’s rebuilding #dotcons platforms with nicer vibes.

The #NGO layer brings its own infection: risk aversion softened by consensus theatre. Measurable outputs. Depoliticised language. Branding as reputational management. None of it is directly evil, but it’s structurally parasitic – because the moment legitimacy becomes more important than usefulness, you start designing for funders instead of participants. You optimise optics instead of flows, you protect the brand instead of the commons.

This keeps happening because commons produce surplus – trust, energy, attention, infrastructure – and institutional actors are trained to capture surplus. They don’t see themselves as parasites. They see themselves as stabilisers. But when their survival depends on controlling narratives, they can’t help bending the project toward those needs. That’s structural parasitism, not personal villainy.

So ask yourself honestly are you building soil or feeding off soil someone else built? Are you increasing abundance or reintroducing scarcity through “sustainable” monetisation? Are you materially decentralising power or just professionalising it? Commons infrastructure should reduce dependence on gatekeepers, not multiply them.

This is a traditional political view of these people

Pick Up the Shovel

Yes, there are parasites. Yes, there’s shit to shovel. No, pretending everything is collaborative harmony doesn’t help anyone. The work of #OMN and #4opens isn’t trend-chasing or #NGO alignment. It’s building resilient soil, designing against digital scarcity, and keeping governance open and genuinely messy. If that makes institutional actors uncomfortable – good. Composting always smells bad before it becomes fertile.

One last thing: stop burning out alone. The number of good people burning out right now is not accidental. It’s what happens when systemic problems get reframed as personal responsibility. Collective infrastructure is weak, crisis is constant, and nobody can carry that alone. Nobody should try. The solution isn’t heroic individual effort. It’s shared architecture. In #FOSS terms: if the system keeps crashing, stop blaming the users and redesign the stack.

That’s the composting we actually need to do.

The Meta-Mess of the “Open” Social Web

The EU opportunity and danger, what grassroots projects can offer

The #openweb reminds us that meaningful autonomy comes from shared infrastructure, collective governance, and mutual trust. Projects like #OMN are built on this understanding: individuals do not create networks alone; networks create the conditions that allow individuals to flourish. Real freedom grows from commons-based collaboration, not from isolated platforms or competitive silos.

What can grassroots #openweb people actually do when the EU is building alternatives to #dotcons, but with very real risks of recreating European versions of the same problems? This is a historic moment, for the first time in decades public funding is flowing toward digital commons and infrastructure sovereignty is being taken seriously. Federated technologies like #ActivityPub are gaining traction, largely due to years of grassroots work which is leading to initiatives such as @NGICommons attempting to support open infrastructure.

But alongside this opportunity comes an obvious risk, that they replace Californian platform capitalism with European platform capitalism. The danger: is European #dotcons. Institutional “common sense” – especially when combined with bureaucracy and the #NGO class – tends to reproduce familiar patterns of projects prioritise compliance and institutions over communities. Tech governance becomes professionalised and detached from users and seed communities. Yes, open standards exist, but power centralises anyway as funding rewards scale, stability, and safety rather than needed native grassroots paths.

The result is predictable, European #dotcons. The structural problem is institutions optimise for safety when #EU funding systems are designed around risk avoidance, measurable outcomes to build controlled delivery structures. This leads to only professional actors and institutional partnerships. Grassroots projects – messy, political, horizontal – rarely fit comfortably into this narrow thinking.

So even when the intention is to “build commons,” the outcome becomes safe-looking infrastructure that lacks living social ecosystems. The commons turn into infrastructure without community, and frequently fail, leaving funding poured down the drain and more #techshit to compost.

Why grassroots counter-currents matter is that healthy technology ecosystems need tension between institutional builders for stability, grassroots radicals for innovation and activists for accountability. This balancing leads to communities and real-world grounding.

Without this tension, governance ossifies and technology becomes abstracted from users. Political imagination shrinks and becomes #blocked. Grassroots projects like #OMN represent the compost layer, the messy soil where new forms grow. Institutions rarely generate this energy themselves.

Where initiatives like #NGICommons sit is that some people inside these initiatives genuinely want openness. Much like early Google’s “don’t be evil” phase, there is still a window of possibility. This means influence is still possible and direction is not fully locked in. Individuals inside may be allies, even if institutional structures trend toward mainstreaming. The danger is not simply bad intentions, it is the structural gravity toward institutionalisation.

We need practical strategies (not just critique) to move grassroots actors to shift direction, critique alone is not enough. Practical engagement matters to frame grassroots work as ecosystem infrastructure. Don’t argue only from ideology, speak in terms institutions understand: that tech ecosystems need experimental edges as monocultures fail. We need to argue that diversity increases resilience.

Policy language travels further, when we push for small “wild funding” streams. Instead of demanding institutional transformation, push for small structural openings:

microgrants

low-bureaucracy funding

experimental tracks

funding for governance experiments, not just technical deliverables.

Small budgets, cents on the euro, can create disproportionate impact.

Promote ActivityPub + social governance together as many EU projects adopt federation technically while retaining centralised governance culturally. We need to communicate that federation without social decentralisation is fake decentralisation. This is where #OMN has strong positioning.

Build parallel legitimacy, not only opposition, as institutions might respond to working prototypes with visible communities that demonstrated outcomes. Critique alone rarely shifts funding flows, were working alternatives do.

We need to find sympathetic insiders, every institutional structure contains pragmatists, a few idealists and sometimes meany reformers. So bridge-building matters. Not everyone inside #NGICommons or EU initiatives is an opponent, some are actively trying to resist corporate capture from within.

The EU currently has three possible futures:

European #dotcons – platform capitalism with EU branding
Technocratic infrastructure without social life (#techshit to compost)
Living digital commons grounded in grassroots communities.

The third path requires messy activism with strong social processes (#4opens) and historical memory rooted in #openweb culture. Without pressure from the grassroots edge, institutions drift toward the first outcome by default.

The deeper insight is that grassroots movements do not need to “win” against mainstreaming. They need to remain the compost layer that keeps the ecosystem alive. That means critique combined with collaboration where possible, strong and grounded independent experimentation and most importantly refusal of capture.

Why mainstream EU tech funding needs counter-currents, why tech activism matters

Europe, the Fediverse, and the story we failed to tell

A bunch of native #openweb people spent real time, energy, and focus pushing the #EU toward the #Fediverse. This wasn’t theoretical, it wasn’t speculative, it wasn’t a #NGO whitepaper or a #VC funding pitch. It was practical outreach, grounded in working technology and lived experience, aimed at reducing Europe’s dependency on centralized corporate platforms.

One concrete moment of this work was the webinar organised between the European Commission and the ActivityPub community: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/webinar-with-the-european-commission-and-ap-community/1507

The webinars mattered, they demonstrated that EU institutions were genuinely open to #ActivityPub as a viable public infrastructure standard, not as a niche hobby project, but as a way to regain institutional and civic agency without defaulting to US-based platforms.

This is the work we needed more of, but this kind of engagement is slow, unglamorous, and politically awkward. It doesn’t fit VC startup narratives or revolutionary aesthetics. But it is the work required if Europe wants digital sovereignty without surrendering to #BigTech or reinventing the same centralized failures under an #EU flag.

So the obvious question is: what went wrong? Drift, fragmentation, and the return of the #dotcons. Instead of consolidating that momentum, the grassroots fractured, attention drifted, energy leaked away, people burned out or moved on. In the end, outreach was blocked from both sides

And then slowly, predictably, attention returned to the familiar #dotcons, because they are easy, visible, and culturally dominant. They offer the illusion of reach without the substance of agency, in the long run, this is just more #techshit to compost later.

#SocialHub itself documents much of this history. The discussions are there, the threads exist, the intent is visible. But there is little aggregation, little synthesis, and almost no narrative continuity. For anyone not already embedded, it’s hard to see what mattered, what succeeded, and what was quietly blocked or abandoned.

The missing piece is our own history – this is the core failure – we are very bad at telling our own history, this thread says it plainly: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/eu-outreach-if-we-dont-tell-our-story-am-not-sure-who-will/2950

Because we didn’t document, curate, and repeat this story, the same myths keep resurfacing:

“The EU was never interested.”

“Federation can’t work at institutional scale.”

“There were no serious alternatives.”

“Centralized platforms are the only realistic option.”

None of these are true – but they feel true when history is missing. When people don’t know that EU–Fediverse outreach already happened, when they don’t know that viable alternatives already exist, when they don’t know that these paths were actively neglected rather than disproven.

Then people fall – again and again – for the #dotcons mess, believing it’s the only possible future. This matters now, as focus shifts back to tech change, and is exactly why #OMN, #indymediaback, #makinghistory, and #OGB exist, not as competing platforms, not as replacements for everything else, but as infrastructure for memory, communication, and accountability.

Before we argue about funding models, platforms, or scale, we need to get the ordering right:

History — to remember what already worked and what failed, and why

Media — to tell the story properly, in our own words

Governance — to keep power visible, contestable, and rooted in trust rather than myth

Without these, attempts at “European digital sovereignty” will reproduce the same capture dynamics under a different logo. Telling the story is political work, if we don’t tell our story, someone else will, and it won’t be told in our interests. It will be told as inevitability, as market logic, as “there was no alternative.” That story always ends the same way: more centralization, more dependency, more enclosure – followed by another round of cleanup and composting.

We already did part of the hard work, we opened doors, we proved viability. What’s missing is not only technology – it’s memory, narrative, and continuity. Until we fix that, Europe will keep mistaking amnesia for realism, and surrender for pragmatism.

Examples of the problem we need to compost

In #openweb tech, these people are the problem not the solution https://freeourfeeds.com/whoweare

This is spoiler incompetent #techshit and likely funding mess we need to ignore https://cybernews.com/tech/europe-social-media-w/ Then compost.

Diversity is good, but this is a prat move https://www.modalfoundation.org/ the are quite a few of these.

There is no intelligence in AI – and no path to any

Despite the constant #mainstreaming hype, the branding, and the trillions of dollars being poured into it, there is a simple reality that needs to be stated plainly: There is no intelligence in current “AI”, and there is no working path from today’s Large Language Models (#LLM) and Machine Learning (#ML) systems to anything resembling real, general intelligence.

What we are living through is not an intelligence revolution, it is a bubble – one we’ve seen many times before. The problem with this recurring mess is social, as a functioning democracy depends on the free flow of information. At its core, democracy is an information system, shared agreement that knowledge flows outward, to inform debate, shape collective decisions, and enable dissent. The wisdom of the many is meant to constrain the power of the few.

Over recent decades, we have done the opposite. We built ever more legal and digital locks to consolidate power in the hands of gatekeepers. Academic research, public data, scientific knowledge, and cultural memory have been locked behind paywalls and proprietary #dotcons platforms. The raw materials of our shared understanding, often created with public funding, have been enclosed, monetised, and sold back to the public for profit.

Now comes the next inversion. Under the banner of so-called #AI “training”, that same locked up knowledge has been handed wholesale to machines owned by a small number of corporations. These firms harvest, recombine, and extract value from it, while returning nothing to the commons. This is not a path to liberal “innovation”. It is the construction of anti-democratic, authoritarian power – and we do need to say this plainly.

A democracy that defers its knowledge to privately controlled algorithms becomes a spectator to its own already shaky governance. Knowledge is a public good, or democracy fails even harder than it already is.

Instead of knowledge flowing to the people, it flows upward into opaque black boxes. These closed custodians decide what is visible, what is profitable, and increasingly, what is treated as “truth”. This enclosure stacks neatly on top of twenty years of #dotcons social-control technologies, adding yet more layers of #techshit that we now need to compost.

Like the #dotcons before it, this was never really about copyright or efficiency. It is about whether knowledge is governed by openness or corporate capture, and therefore who knowledge is for. Knowledge is a #KISS prerequisite for any democratic path. A society cannot meaningfully debate science, policy, or justice if information is hidden behind paywalls and filtered through proprietary systems.

If we allow AI corporations to profit from mass appropriation of public knowledge while claiming immunity from accountability, we are choosing a future where access to understanding is governed by corporate power rather than democratic values.

How we treat knowledge – who can access it, who can build on it, and who is punished for sharing it – has become a direct test of our democratic commitments. We should be honest about what our current choices say about us in this ongoing mess.

The uncomfortable technical truth is this: general #AI is not going to emerge from current #LLM and ML systems – regardless of scale, compute, or investment. This has serious consequences. There is no coming step-change toward the “innovation” promised to investors, politicians, and corporate strategists, now or in any foreseeable future. The economic bubble beneath the hype matters because AI is currently propping up a fragile, fantasy economic reality. The return-on-investment investors are desperate for simply is not there.

So-called “AI agents”, beyond trivial and tightly constrained tasks, will default to being just more #dotcons tools of algorithmic control. Beyond that, thanks to the #geekproblem, they represent an escalating security nightmare, one in which attackers will always have the advantage over defenders, this #mainstreaming arms race will be endless and structurally unwinnable.

Yes, current #LLM systems do have useful applications, but they are narrow, specific, and limited. They do not justify the scale of capital being burned. There are no general-purpose deliverables coming to support the hype. At some point, the bubble will end – by explosion, implosion, or slow deflation.

What we can already predict, especially in the era of #climatechaos, is the lost opportunity cost. Vast financial, human, and institutional resources are being misallocated. When this collapses, the tech sector will be even more misshapen, and history suggests it will not be kind to workers, let alone the environment. This is the same old #deathcult pattern: speculation, enclosure, damage, and denial.

This moment is not about being “pro” or “anti” technology. It is about recognising that intelligence is social, contextual, embodied, and collective – and that no amount of #geekproblem statistical pattern-matching can replace that. It is about understanding that democracy cannot survive when knowledge is enclosed and mediated by #dotcons corporate capture beyond meaningful public control.

To recap: There is no intelligence in current #AI. There is no path to real AI from here. Pretending otherwise is not innovation – it is denial, producing yet more #techshit that we will eventually have to compost. Any sophist that argue otherwise need to be sacked if they arnt doing anything practical.

The only question is whether we use this moment to rebuild knowledge as a public good – or allow one more enclosure to harden around us. History – if it continues – will not be neutral about the answer.

We fucked up… and that matters because we still have agency

Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth: we fucked up the last 20 years of #openweb tech. Not “they” fucked it up. Not only #BigTech, not only venture capital, not only governments and surveillance states. We did, especially those of us who were closest to the tools, the protocols, the decisions – the geeks, developers, architects, and maintainers who shaped how this stuff actually worked in practice.

That matters, because it means we still have direct power over what happens next. Too often, external forces are used as an excuse. “Capital captured everything.” “Users don’t care.” “The network effects are too strong.” These stories become a form of #blocking – a way to avoid the harder work of change and challenge that is still possible inside our own communities.

The #geekproblem role in the #techmess is one of the hardest things to admit, that much of the current #techmess wasn’t imposed on us – it was designed by us. We built systems that privileged scale over care, efficiency over use, protocol purity over social process. We treated governance as a technical problem and social mess as something to be engineered away. We told ourselves that decentralisation alone would save us, while quietly centralising power in code repos, foundation boards, and informal hierarchies.

This is the #geekproblem in action: the blindness to social value, to lived use, to human mediation. The result is vast piles of #techshit – technically impressive, socially hollow systems that decay quickly because nobody actually owns them in a meaningful way.

And when these systems fail, the blame gets pushed outward. “The market did this.” “Users misused it.” “NGOs ruined it.” Sometimes those things are true – but they are never the whole story.

Then we have the # fashionistas default worship of the #deathcult which is the part people really don’t like hearing: most of us default-worship the #deathcult. #Neoliberalism doesn’t need true believers to function. It survives perfectly well on habit, convenience, careerism, and fear. We reproduce it every time we copy the UX patterns of the #dotcons, every time we design for engagement instead of meaning, every time we prioritise respectability over rupture.

At this point, polite critique is not enough. The climate is collapsing. Social trust is eroded. Institutions are hollowed out facades. We do not have the luxury of endless moderation and tone-policing.

Let’s be clear, it is well past time to hold active worshippers of the #deathcult in contempt – not as individuals to be cancelled, but as ideas and practices to be openly rejected. And more importantly, to challenge our own default compliance with those values.

Time is the one thing we don’t have. Yes, this shift will happen. Over the last few years, more people have abandon #dotcons, more will rediscover collective tools, more will rebuild local, horizontal networks.

The #OMN is precisely about that internal power: what we do together, how we organise, how we build, and crucially, what we refuse to reproduce. But here’s the problem #climatechaos does not wait for cultural maturation. Ecological breakdown, authoritarian drift, and economic precarity are accelerating now. If the #openweb is going to matter, it has to matter in this decade – not as a promise, but as lived infrastructure.

That means pushing change and challenge now, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it breaks consensus, even when it costs status. We cannot keep living inside copies of the #dotcons is one of the clearest failures of the last 10 years is this: we kept rebuilding copies of corporate platforms and calling them alternatives. The same feeds. Same metrics. Same influencer dynamics. Same UX assumptions. Just with better politics in the bio. That will never be enough.

For projects like #OMN to become real, we need to invest serious resources and energy into good #UX for #openweb projects – not slickness, not branding, but clarity, legibility, and human-scale control. Interfaces that normal people can understand. Systems that work in mess. Tools that support mediation instead of suppression. This is not about perfection. It’s about use-value over #blocking.

The next step is obvious and unavoidable, it’s not more think pieces, more foundations, more grant cycles. It’s rebuilding social-technical systems that people can actually use together, under pressure, without surrendering control. We already know this. Deep down, everyone reading this does.

The question is whether we act on it – or whether we keep hiding behind inevitability while the world burns. The #OMN is not a guarantee. It’s a refusal: to keep worshipping the #deathcult,
to keep copying the #dotcons, to keep pretending we have more time than we do.

The work is here. The tools are here. What’s missing is the will to stop fucking around.

Human tech – OMN

What are you doing today that is not pointless? Not a rhetorical question, a line in the sand. As too much contemporary “activism” is still busywork inside the #dotcons – visible, branded, career-friendly, and structurally harmless. Our old activist circles took the healthy internal tensions that once kept projects like #indymedia honest and fed them upward into a #fashernista vampire class: NGOs, foundations, panels, consultancies. For twenty years, they’ve drained grassroots energy to build CVs and gain access to “power”. That’s not radical, it’s capture.

Now, if we are serious about surviving #climatechaos and confronting the #deathcult, we have to stop doing pointless #techshit and start rebuilding outside the platforms that profit from our failure.

We need projects that doesn’t need permission, we need a #DIY crew. That means gathering like-minded people off the #dotcons, working collectively, not performatively, building small, useful things that actually publish, connect, and persist, following the #4opens: open process, open governance, open code, open data to accept mess, conflict, and compost as signs of life

The Open Media Network (#OMN) is not a brand or career ladder, not a #NGO pitch deck.
It’s unfinished work from the original #openweb – work that was paused, captured, and now needs rebooting.

So again, plainly – What are you doing today that is not pointless? If the answer is “posting”, “networking”, or “waiting for funding”, that’s a bad answer. If the answer is building with others, publishing outside capture, sharing control, doing the unglamorous work, welcome back.

#indymediaback #OMN #4opens #makeinghistory #OGB

Belief in technical decentralisation

This space has a long history. The #fediverse grew out of the “cats” of libertarianism and, to a lesser extent, anarchism – notably without the (O). That lineage mattered. It shaped the instincts of the space: suspicion of central authority, an emphasis on autonomy, and a belief that technical decentralisation could substitute for social and political process.

I wrote this a few years ago.

Today the landscape has shifted. This #openweb space is increasingly layered with #NGO capture and thick #mainstreaming noise. Yet it remains fundamentally #native. That contradiction is where the real work now lies.

So the question is not whether the #fediverse is “good” or “bad”. The question is how we rebalance it so it becomes effective for real change and challenge. This is where #4opens matters – taking #FOSS out of narrow tech culture and back into society as a lived, social process.

We also need to be honest about failure. In the struggle between open and closed, we didn’t just lose because they won. We lost because we failed. And this matters, because we have power over our own failures. Over theirs, we mostly have liberal wish-fulfilment.

That distinction is crucial.

If you are genuinely interested in social change, there is one thing you should not do:
do not push #mainstreaming agendas.

This is where the Fediverse is badly out of balance. The flows are soaked through with #deathcult assumptions, even when wrapped in progressive language. These agendas reproduce the system while pretending to soften it. They are driven by careerism, respectability politics, and status-chasing – not transformation.

What the #fediverse does not need is more branding, more respectability, more #NGO frameworks, or more “safe” narratives. That path leads to capture, stagnation, and eventual irrelevance. What we actually need are real alternatives: grounded social process, not just protocol purity; governance that emerges from use, not authority; democratic mediation, not aristocratic coders; trust built through practice, not #blocking policy documents.

What the world actually looks like

To be clear, #NGO occupation rarely looks like a hostile takeover. It arrives wearing the language of care, safety, professionalism, and responsibility. For many involved, the problem is not intention, it is structural effect.

A recurring pattern appears: governance without mandate. Foundations and NGOs emerge claiming to “represent the Fediverse” while having no meaningful user representation at all. Boards dominated by a small, self-referencing mix of developers, funders, and institutional figures. Decisions made behind closed doors, then presented as consensus.

This is the classic NGO move: speaking for communities rather than being accountable to them. Native, messy, grassroots portrayal is replaced with advisory councils and codes of conduct written by people who do not do the day-to-day social work of maintaining messy communities.

Then comes funding-driven agenda setting. Once grant money enters, priorities shift. Work that is legible to funders gets done; work that is socially necessary but messy gets sidelined. Success is measured in reports, visibility, and institutional recognition. Use-value is replaced by funding-value. Common-sense problems are reframed as opportunities to be sold to institutions rather than grown with communities.

This produces policy-first, people-second thinking: universal moderation frameworks, platform-wide “best practices”, compliance language imported from reactions to corporate platforms. All of this ignores the Fediverse’s actual strength – that it is contextual, local, and plural.

What works for a medium-sized EU instance does not work for a radical activist server, a queer safe space, or a small-language community. One-size-fits-all governance is a centralising instinct wearing decentralised branding.

Conflict is then sanitised rather than mediated. Conflict is treated as reputational risk, not as a normal and necessary part of social life. The response becomes pre-emptive rules, rigid enforcement, avoidance of political disagreement – in #OMN languae, #blocking.

But grassroots communities are not products. Conflict does not disappear when it is hidden; it reappears as burnout, factionalism, and quiet exits. This is one of the main drivers of the long-term churn that drains focus and energy from the #openweb.

Meanwhile, the space is distracted by attempts to brand the Fediverse for mainstream acceptability: “safe for brands”, “ready for institutions”, “just like Twitter, but nicer”. This strips away its radical roots while offering none of the resources of corporate platforms – the worst of both worlds.

Finally, depoliticisation is smuggled in under the banner of neutrality. Calls for “apolitical” spaces function in practice as quiet enforcement of liberal norms, exclusion of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and system-critical voices, and privileging those already comfortable within the mainstream. Neutrality is not neutral. It is a political choice that favours the status quo – the #deathcult dressed up as common sense.

This kind of behaver is inevitable, so the question is not if we ban it, but much more how we balance this with healthy grassroots structure. The way out of this is not less politics. It is better, more grounded politics: rooted in lived use, open process, and the messy reality of collective life.

Get off your knees.

Why “messy” matters explicit, social, and unavoidable. The word “messy” matters, a lot. It’s not a weakness, it’s the core requirement of any humane alternative social technological project. If what we build only works when everything is clean, controlled, and predictable, then it will collapse the moment real people start using it.

Real life is messy, communities are messy, power is messy, conflict is messy. If our tools and processes can’t survive that, then they aren’t tools for liberation – they’re toys for ideal conditions that don’t exist. This is where most alt-tech keeps failing.

We keep trying to build hard systems that assume away social complexity. Perfect protocols, elegant abstractions, clean governance models. But this obsession with cleanliness produces brittle systems that shatter under any stress. Anything that requires everyone to behave “correctly” in order to function is already authoritarian by design.

That’s why messy-first thinking is not optional – it’s the way out. Most “hard code” is actually #techshit from the moment it’s written, not an insult, it’s compost. The uncomfortable truth is the value of software is not only in the code, it’s in the social use around this code. Documentation, shared norms, trust, mediation, onboarding, storytelling, conflict resolution, continuity – this is where value lives. Code is one needed layer of that social substrate. Without the substrate, the code is dead on arrival.

This is where the #geekproblem bites hardest. The value that actually matters – social use – is invisible to many of the people writing the code. So they optimise for what they can see: features, refactors, rewrites, new projects. The result is more churn, more fragmentation, and ever-growing piles of decaying #techshit. From the inside, it feels like progress. From the outside, it’s entropy.

This is why #4opens is such a sharp tool if we use it. Not just open source code, but open process, open governance, open data, open participation. That means valuing outreach, long-running social threads, and shared ownership as much as clever technical solutions. If a project can’t explain itself in plain language, can’t survive disagreement, can’t onboard non-experts, and can’t evolve without a small priesthood of maintainers, then it’s already failing – no matter how elegant the code is.

So the question of value isn’t “how clever is the system?” It’s: who can use it, who can shape it, and who can carry it forward when things get messy? We need a diversity of tools and cultures that can live in the mud, absorb conflict, and keep going anyway. Mess isn’t the problem, mess is the medium.

There is such a thing as society -and the #openweb depends on it

There is such a thing as society. The entire #openweb is built on that assumption 🙂
Deny it, and everything collapses into noise, power grabs, and enclosure. That denial, dressed up today as “post-truth” – is killing us.

Our current media ecology is broken. So called #AI and Google are no longer a useful way to find information about most things that actually matter. This isn’t accidental; it’s a structural #dotcons problem. Extraction, advertising, and algorithmic manipulation have replaced human discovery, context, and trust.

The same sickness runs through much of today’s open-source and free software world. Its governance models are still rooted in medieval political ideas: aristocrats, benevolent dictators, kings and courts. That might have muddled through in the 20th century, but it is obviously useless for the world we now live in.

The last twenty years trying to mediate this with neoliberal #stupidindividualism has only made things worse. The result is towering piles of steaming #techshit, endlessly churned, rarely useful, and increasingly disconnected from any healthy social reality. This is the #geekproblem made in: code, silicon and concrete.

The #mainstreaming disaster driven by #dotcons is obvious. We don’t need to relitigate it every five minutes. For motivation and clarity, let’s put them to one side and focus on what we can actually change. Our own tech culture is still hopelessly mired in the #geekproblem. So yes, we need to compost a lot of our own mess.

The path out of both the #closedweb and the geek cul-de-sac is not new. It’s old, boring, and powerful: trust, shared responsibility, and human-scale democracy. If we are serious, the #openweb has to be rebooted with grassroots democracy at its core. Social tech needs social governance. Without that, we are just recreating vertical power with nicer licences.

This is where #OGB (Open Governance Bodies) matter. With real democratic process, it becomes relatively simple to push the #dotcons back out of spaces they currently dominate by default. Without democracy, they will always win, not because they are smarter, but because they are organised.

Right now, we are drowning in the #mainstreaming mess. And worse, we are still adding to it. Every pointless project, every ego-driven fork, every governance-free platform accelerates #techchurn and deepens the rot. We need to stop pretending this is neutral.

Yes, “open standards” are a mess, always have been, but they are the mess we must build on until enough of the #openweb is rebooted – including democratic decision-making – to rejuvenate and civilise the standards bodies themselves. Strong democracy changes the game. With it, enclosure becomes contestable. Without it, we just get louder arguments and faster failure.

If you care about this direction, add a statement of support here https://unite.openworlds.info/…/wiki/Statements-of-support You don’t need permission. You don’t need to convince everyone. You need to show up and help build.

And when people doing obviously stupid things can’t understand what the #OMN hashtags mean? Click the hashtags and think, or stand and shout, then hit the block button. You get to choose 🙂 This is not rudeness, it’s focus. And focus is how we stop adding to the mess and start composting it into something that might actually grow.

Building, what comes next?

#mainstreaming people are wilfully blind and alt people tend to be pessimistic, it’s a problem. Historically, real social change doesn’t arrive by waiting for collapse. It arrives because people are active, they build alternatives in advance, strong enough to bridge the mess when existing systems fail and lose legitimacy. This isn’t theory. It’s how change has always happened.

If you are interested in a better outcome, we need to remember, build first, collapse later is the lesson that we keep forgetting. You don’t wait for the crash, you prepare, are ready to catch people when it comes.

Projects like the #OMN are currently blocked because capitalism, especially after forty years of neoliberalism, has poisoned our idea of individualism. We’re trained to see ourselves as isolated actors rather than members of a society capable of collective care and collective power. This keeps us passive while the systems hollow out around us.

One of the biggest blocks to change is the belief that politics is something done to us, rather than by us. People blame politicians for everything – climate breakdown, cultural decay, economic precarity – while avoiding responsibility for the systems we participate in daily.

In the working alt paths, we build parallel systems to make change happen. Revolutions don’t begin with a dramatic break. They begin quietly, when people redirect time, energy, trust, and care into structures that actually work. Gradually, those structures grow. Eventually, the old ones hollow out and lose relevance.

But we are society. It starts and ends with us. Learning how to help your neighbours now – feeding people, housing people, sharing skills, organising locally – isn’t charity. It’s practice. It builds the muscles, myths, and traditions we’ll need when systems fail harder than they already are. And they will fail. The only uncertainty is how badly.

This can start anywhere – including with shared tech infrastructure like the #OMN. You don’t need permission, mass consensus. You, simply, need commitment, continuity, and care.

Over the last decade, #techchurn has produced mountains of #techshit. Both mainstream and “alternative” tech piles need composting if we want to grow a more humane world. From a grassroots perspective, many past alternatives – anarchist, ecological, socialist – did work imperfectly, until they were eaten, flattened, or professionalised by #NGO, #fashernista, and #deathcult dynamics.

Stepping away from the tech mess means composting it. It’s good that people try not to push pointless tech projects. And let’s be honest: most new tech projects are pointless. In the era of #climatechaos, we don’t have the luxury of pretending otherwise.

That’s already happening, unevenly and messily, especially across the #Fediverse. The real question isn’t whether parallel systems will emerge. The question is whether the balance will be humane, democratic, and resilient, or authoritarian and exclusionary.

To figure out what’s worth building, we need to do #4opens reviews and publish them. This isn’t gatekeeping – it’s collective responsibility. Let’s build a shared culture of useful tech, together. The task now is to reboot what worked, using federated #4opens tech, and then innovate forward from there. This is where #OMN and #indymediaback sit: not nostalgia, but composted continuity.

In the era of #climatechaos, too many people are on their knees worshipping the #deathcult. We need to call pointless things pointless – clearly, calmly, without fear. If that idea scares you, ask why. Fear is how obedience is maintained. #fashernistas, get off your knees. Use the #4opens as a shovel. There are piles of techshit that need composting.

Collapse won’t be clean or total. It’s unlikely we’ll see a single cinematic moment. What’s far more likely is a long series of crises: recessions, austerity, market “corrections”, institutional decay, shrinking legitimacy. Capitalism isn’t stable. It’s inherently extractive and unsustainable. Growth has been artificially inflated to concentrate wealth upward, while the real ecological, social, and psychological costs are pushed downward. The illusion of growth hides the reality of extraction.

Power won’t step aside politely, as legitimacy shrinks, power concentrates. Smaller and smaller groups cling to control through coercion, surveillance, and force. History shows that entrenched power has to be pushed over, not waited out. That doesn’t mean chaos. It means having something better ready.

All thinking is critique. If you aren’t looking at faults, you probably aren’t looking at the thing at all. Don’t be afraid of that. Gardening requires digging. Lift your head, your shovel. Dig, and plant.

Without parallel institutions, collapse just creates a vacuum. And vacuums get filled by the worst actors. What actually matters doesn’t appear magically after a crisis. Community, care, knowledge, trust, culture, and shared infrastructure are built slowly, beforehand, by people who show up consistently.

The #Fediverse is an accidental #openweb reboot – a product of #fashernista energy, messy and decentralised. Herding cats is hard, but it’s not a flaw. It’s the material we’re working with. One path forward is #OGB – grassroots, DIY producer governance – building shared norms and flows without hard centralisation.

This isn’t apocalypse fantasy, it’s continuity. Waiting for the system to fall is a losing strategy. Protesting without building is noise. Commentary without construction is theatre.

If you want change: build alongside, build underneath, build beyond. That isn’t extremism, it’s history.