This mess is driven by climate breakdown, growing inequality, technological disruption, war, political instability and the weakening of democratic institutions are no longer separate problems, they reinforce each other. At the same time, we are seeing a feedback loop of political movements built around fear, scapegoating, hierarchy and fantasies of escape. This creates a basic question we need to focus on – how do we build the means to live through these crises together, rather than retreating into individual survival, authoritarianism or delusions of technological escape?
One of the strongest #blocks running through the current crisis is what we could be called exit culture. The wealthy #nastyfew pushing the mess can try to buy their way out through the nasty fantasy of private security, property and technology. Some feed political movements that imagine an escape into an ethnically or culturally purified nation. Some religious movements look towards another imagined world. Some technology #geekproblem culture imagines that humanity can escape its material limits through AI, automation, space or digital transcendence.
Different ideologies, but a similar mess – the world is broken, so find a way out. This is a dangerous stupid response to systemic crisis. There is no #stupidindividualism exit from #climatechaos. There is no technological #dotcons platform that allows us to escape social relationships. And there is no bunker large enough to protect a society from the consequences of destroying the living systems it depends upon. We need to actively be composting this mainstreaming mess, the alternative is not to escape, it is to focus on becoming more capable of being here.
Then on the left the is a matching fantasy, collapse is not automatically progressive. It is easy to look at broken institutions and think that their collapse must create an opportunity for something better. But collapse has no political direction of its own, maybe it can produce mutual aid, solidarity and new forms of democratic organization. More likely we get authoritarianism, scapegoating, violence and stronger hierarchies.
The outcome depends partly on what people and communities are ready to do when crisis washes over them. If communities have networks (like the #OMN), relationships, communication systems, practical skills and ways of making decisions together (like the #OGB), crisis can become an opportunity to build something new. If they don’t, people are much more likely to fall back on fear and whoever appears to offer simple answers.
So preparation matters, but preparation is hopeless when it means becoming an individual survivalist. We need to balance this commons sense urge with working collective ways of looking after each other. It 20 years past time to move for survivalism to #KISS mutual aid. We need focus on how do we make sure people can look after each other when things become difficult?
That means better late than never to building relationships before the crisis, knowing who is around us, knowing how to communicate, where resources are, how to organize. Knowing how to disagree without destroying the group, how to make decisions, share responsibility. This is grassroots working democratic resilience from the bottom up.
We need real repossess to authoritarian pushing insecurity – Find someone to blame – The nation against the foreigner – The majority against the minority – The “real people” against outsiders – The pure against the contaminated. The hard right are pushing belonging through this kinda exclusion.
To balance this mess we need need another form of belonging, that means building coalitions capable of holding difference without turning every disagreement into another power struggles. We need to compost the false choice between local organizing and large-scale networks. We need the strong local relationships to provide the social foundation.
But we also need lossy #4opens flow networks to allow those communities to exchange knowledge, tools, resources and experience without surrendering their autonomy. This is one of the reasons the #Fediverse and #ActivityPub are interesting. Federation gives us a technical path where independent communities can remain independent while still communicating with each other.
This principle can extend beyond the current copy’s of #dotcons social media. We need to build projects like the #OMN based on local relationships + open networks = distributed resilience. This is a much more interesting path than simply building another or replenishing the normal centralized platforms.
A #KISS move from participation to action is to grow federated networks of people who organize, communicate, take responsibility, resolve conflicts and build things together. Based on technology that supports social process rather than replace it with blinded control.
We don’t need a perfect future, a lot of political narrow thinking is trapped between two fantasies. One says, the existing institutions will eventually fix themselves. The other says, the whole thing has to collapse before we can build something new. It is dangerous to accept either of these paths blindly. What we do need to grow is trust networks, practical democratic experiments, its fine that none of these is perfect. They just need to work better than the current mess, to connect people and communities, so they can move from fear to cooperation.
The hard right is good at turning insecurity into fear. they feed from fear of migration, cultural change, technological change. Fear of economic collapse, losing status and fear of the future. But the knee jerk reactions cant be to simply tell people not to be afraid as people have real reasons to feel insecure. The better balancing is to build something that gives people something better to fall back on than fear. That means replacing fear → scapegoating → authoritarianism with crisis → cooperation → solidarity. Not utopian, but as practical.
On the native openweb path this is the question – the bigger reason for building the #OMN. As we don’t know exactly what the next twenty or forty years will look like, we do know that the existing system is becoming increasingly unstable. We know that climate chaos is accelerating, that #dotcons technology is concentrating power. We know that authoritarian politics is growing. And we know that simply defending the existing structures is not enough.
So rather than waiting for the next crisis to tell us what to do, we start building now. Not an escape route, another #closedweb platform as smoke and mirrors for another hierarchy waiting to take control. A network of people and communities that can communicate, remember, cooperate, organize and govern themselves. That is the native #openweb path to compost this mess, that is the practical meaning of the old slogan another world is possible.
We don’t have to wait for another world, we can start building the means for it here.
#OMN #openweb #4opens #Fediverse #ActivityPub #mutualaid #democracy #resilience #KISS
