Commons and the metaphor of “grow a backbone”

With the tyranny of the structureless path, every attempt to share the commons decays into a fog of personalities, cliques, and unspoken power. What needs composting here is that, at best, you end up with a smiling violent man as the backstop of governance.

Without mediating structures, what emerges is not freedom but hidden hierarchy. “Smiling violence” – the agreeable man (or clique) who insists they’re just holding things together – quietly blocks challenge, manipulates process, and reserves the final say. If you’re not paying attention, and can’t move away, you wake to find yourself living in #feudalism, with its ever-present threat of personal violence lurking behind the smile.

This is how “horizontal” spaces rot. They confuse the absence of shared structures with openness, when in fact it is poisoned soil: domination by those most willing to coerce, block, or flatter. Without functioning myths and traditions, shared trust, and open processes, what grows is not commons but personal power, one person’s will, or a small group’s grip.

The smiling violent man is not an accident. He is the inevitable product of structurelessness:

Without flows of accountability, you get bottlenecks of control.

Without mediating trust systems, you get gatekeepers posing as “protectors.”

Without a backbone, you get a backstop, a hard edge of coercion dressed in kindness.

The result: commons replaced by fiefdoms, trust replaced by muscle, care replaced by the mask of “caring the most.” Once that happens, the commons are no longer common, they are held hostage.

When I see this again and again, I sometimes say: “grow a backbone.” But this rarely lands well. So let’s pause and ask what backbone really means in social settings:

  1. Structure / Stability: Like a spine holding the body upright, a social backbone is the framework that keeps everything from collapsing into mush. In #OMN terms: the #5F framework is the backbone, UX, UI, and culture all grow around it.
  2. Courage / Integrity: To “have backbone” means to stand firm under pressure. For movements, this means holding the line when mainstreaming forces, fashionistas, or gatekeepers push back. Backbone is refusing co-option, staying rooted in trust.
  3. Invisible but Essential: The backbone is not the face, not the style. It’s the quiet strength – shared trust and open processes – that allows everything else to move. Often invisible, but without it, nothing functions.

A social backbone, then, is the shared trust + open processes that holds a community upright against both internal decay and external capture. By contrast, on the progressive path the #fashionistas build style without backbone (pretty, but collapses quickly), and the #geekproblem builds bone without flesh (rigid, alienating).

#KISS


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6 thoughts on “Commons and the metaphor of “grow a backbone”

  1. @info Hmmmm. If you want to push your composting metaphor that little bit further it happens mostly without smiling men wielding shovels and turning it over to accelerate the aeration process, but by the activities of invertebrates, fungi and bacteria. Not sure how that helps though?

    1. @rooftopjaxx @info

      Good points, when I talk about stink it's about bad process, so less stink when you do process well, It's what the shovels are for. The shovel metaphor = #OMN

      it's a joined up story 🙂

      What did you think of the violence post https://hamishcampbell.com/the-metaphor-of-grow-a-backbone/

      1. @hamishcampbell @info Wrong link to the violence post perhaps?
        A little more on the backbone, in addition to what @RobertoArchimboldi said: We're all aware the Internet, built as (and remaining) a war machine – despite the rhetoric of backbone infrastructure – was designed for redundancy so that it routes around any individual points of failure (until totally annihilated). An argument for exoskeletons as well as invertebrates? 😉

        1. @rooftopjaxx @info @RobertoArchimboldi

          I like this history as balance to #mainstreaming view https://www.apc.org/en/news/internet-radically-different-place-because-apc

          And as tech is embedded ideology, the people who created the internet created a computer network to work without a state this is a good definition of anarchy.

          We need to be clear about "native" and non-native paths.

        2. @rooftopjaxx @hamishcampbell @info poetically I'm not sure that there is a biological metaphor. You want something that is both giving a scaffolding and is ephemeral but I am no biologist

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