The Beautiful Insanity of Activism: How Movements Rot or Blossom

Let’s face it — activism and counter-culture are packed with “insane” people. And thank the gods for that. It’s what makes movements exciting, dynamic, and, most importantly, effective. But like compost, too much of the wrong stuff makes the pile stink. Balance is everything. So, let’s look at this: what causes a movement to stagnate, fail, or bloom into a riotous field of wildflowers?

The Rot (or: Why Your Movement Smells Bad)

• NGO’ists: These bureaucratic barnacles latch onto everything, molding it into whatever’s fundable and fashionably bland. They hoard resources, fill minds with paperwork, and slowly suffocate radical energy. They’re like termites with business cards.
• Encryptionists: Paranoid fuckists who turn usability into a sin and sell fantasies of invulnerability. They preach security like a cult, but the reality is half-baked systems no one can use and a movement too scared to talk to itself.
• Traditional Media Panderers: Useful in small doses, but quickly start reshaping the movement to fit mainstream narratives. Before you know it, your radical campaign against fossil fuels is being sold as a quirky “green lifestyle choice.”
• Horizontal Dotcom’ists: Desperate to ride the movement into start-up glory. If they build with the #4opens, great. If not, they’re a distraction at best and a flaming wreck at worst when people actually try to use their half-built platforms.
• Insecure and Nasty Lifestylists: Attracted to successful grassroots projects like flies to rot. They thrive on internal drama and are fed by the media panderers. Enough of them and your movement eats itself alive.
• Hidden Careerists: Often competent and useful — until they start networking with the NGO’ists and media grifters to build personal brands instead of movements.
• Paranoid Fuckwits: The paranoid glue of grassroots campaigns. In small doses, they help keep things tight. But let them accumulate in leadership, and the infighting becomes an art form.
• Dogmatic Liberals: Lovely people, but the human equivalent of wet blankets. They block anything genuinely disruptive because it makes them uncomfortable, ensuring nothing truly radical gets off the ground.

The Bloom (or: Why the Garden Still Grows)

• Hands-off NGO’s: The quiet good ones. They funnel resources without sucking the life out of movements. A rare species, but precious.
• User-Focused KISS Peer2Peer’ists: The heroes fighting uphill to (re)boot the #openweb with simple, human-centered tools. They understand that people need tech they can actually use, not just theorize about.
• Traditional Media Outreaches: The rare media people who amplify grassroots work without distorting it to fit mainstream appetites. They build bridges, not cages.
• Horizontal Dotcoms (Done Right): Working on open, federated sustainability instead of chasing VC cash. They build tools for the movement, not to sell the movement.
• Healthy Lifestylists: Learning to balance intense campaigning with actual human joy. Letting go of burnout culture and building connected, grounded lives.
• Open Careerists: Using the movement to bootstrap themselves — but carrying open values like a Trojan horse into the belly of institutions. Someone has to infiltrate the beast.
• Secure Organising Crews: Understanding that collective security is a shared responsibility. Keeping things calm, focused, and handling offline realities without spiraling into paranoia.
• Liberal Liberals: The ones who bring just enough common sense to stop things from exploding, but not so much that they kill the spark.

The Chaotic Harmony

Activism is inherently messy, and that’s its strength. The magic happens in the balancing act. A movement with too many paranoid fuckwits or NGO’ists collapses under its own weight. But a movement with a little bit of everything — the wild-eyed dreamers, the practical builders, the media-savvy storytellers, and the steady hands keeping it all together — can actually change the world.

Because, at the end of the day, movements grow like compost. You need some rot. You need some shit. But you also need people willing to shovel through it, plant seeds, and tend the garden. And maybe, just maybe, you need to be a little bit mad to stick around long enough to see it bloom.