This story is about compost, not control: Why #fashionista are doing this #blocking. Our world is smeared in social shit. We live in a vast, stinking pile of it. The left has its post-modern shit – where truth dissolves into vibes and dreams. The right has its fascist shit – where truth is something you enforce with obedience and violence. We drink the seeping effluent from this dung heap. Our work, our shops, our politics, our tech… all of it is smeared in the same rot. The planet itself is decomposing under the weight of this shit.
But, shit makes good compost, you just need a shovel, but #fashionista thinking is the enemy of compost, one of the recurring problems in our movements, from grassroots tech to climate activism to alternative media, is why I call out #fashionista thinking. It’s a complacent, fear-based mindset shaped by aesthetics, purity, and performance rather than process, mess, and collective work.
This blindness leads to a focus on control, and that quickly turns toxic. The moment control becomes the organising principle, everything messy, experimental, or unfinished becomes a threat. And that’s when behaviour turns into this full-on #blocking.
This narrow “thinking” skips the first steps: The awkward attempts, the compost and mud, the scaffolding, the incomplete prototypes. Instead, it judges the seed for not already being a tree, the foundations for not being a building, and the prototype for not being a polished “safe” product.
It’s not just irritating, it’s actively destructive, when #fashionista worldview treats change like a commodity, it’s a poisonous dynamic. The refusal to understand #KISS process leaves people stuck in this pattern, having no idea they’re doing it. They still believe they’re “defending standards”, protecting “the right way”, or acting as guardians of quality or values. But in practice, it’s ignorance at best, and malice or parody at worst.
Organic metaphors help bridge the messy gap: A plant needs soil, soil needs compost, compost is messy. If you can’t handle the compost, you are not working in the garden.
The defensiveness problem… Challenge this behaviour and you get instant negativity. A strong defensiveness kick because critiquing the #fashionista paradigm exposes the gap between self-image and actual impact. People who think they’re “the adults in the room” get angry when told they’re slowing things down. They double down, personalise the issue, and then retreat into purity politics and abstract standards.
Conversations become impossible, because they can’t tolerate talking in “undefined terms”, outside the narrow bandwidth of #mainstreaming “common sense”. Refusing to have conversational space outside the deathcult’s terms is, frankly, worshipping the #deathcult.
The #openweb reboot needs mess, not perfection. The tradition – the real open web, not the #NGO-sanitised simulation – is built on: rough consensus, running code, shared mistakes, public process, imperfect prototypes, open but flawed governance and messy collaboration.
Everything meaningful starts rough, unfinished, and imperfect. Perfection is not the starting point. Perfection is what you get after a thousand messy, iterative steps.
This is why #fashionista thinking harms the #openweb, a strong tendency to block all of this, and worst of all, it convinces people who should be building that they’re “not good enough” to begin. It kills movements before they start. People trapped in this mess rarely see that they’re part of the problem, not the solution.
We need a culture that protects messy steps, if we want the #openweb to reboot in a way that isn’t swallowed by #dotcons logic. We need collective composting, not competitive posturing.
Likewise, we need a culture that treats steps as legitimate even when they’re provisional, blurry, imperfect. Never judge the seed by the standards of the forest, nothing grows if people are afraid to plant.
The #OMN plan, is to keep working and presume people will stop being #mainstreaming prats at some point. And start doing useful #openweb tech. This could be you, message us 🙂
