The last 40 years of #mainstreaming has been nothing but a slow, suffocating descent into #climatechaos, driven by a #deathcult logic that normalised destruction as “common sense.” The worst part? A lot of our critical thinking is still shaped by the corresponding #postmodernism, which has left us floundering in relativism, unable to take action beyond fragmented, individualist gestures.
We’ve utterly failed to build functional alternatives in the last decades. The social, political, and technological landscapes have been co-opted, watered down, and turned into managed dissent. Now, we’re stuck in the wreckage, watching the same people who pushed these failed agendas still setting the terms of debate. Time to #KISS name it, challenge it, and compost it.
Open vs Closed is the core struggle, when activism falls into a shitty, stinking process, it’s always because of control-freakery, and there are only two paths:
- Open Process
If a project is meant to be open, then trying to close things down and hide the dysfunction will only make things worse. The stink seeps out, poisoning everything, the project’s core, its relationships, and every decision made. The dysfunction becomes baked into the structure, leading to a downward spiral of more control, more secrecy, more rot. Eventually, you’re left with an entirely closed project, despite all the performative openness.
- Closed Process
If a project is meant to be closed, then it survives by kicking out dissent, tightly controlling information, and maintaining hierarchical power until it either runs out of funding or loses public goodwill. Trying to “open up” a closed project without a total upheaval is nearly impossible, the repressed dysfunction will explode the moment it’s exposed.
NGOs & Activists: The false open, most NGOs and activist groups operate in a messy hybrid of open/closed. NGOs pretend to be open with consultations and focus groups, but the real decisions happen in closed rooms to maintain funding and careers. Activist groups start open, but as they grow, they close up due to power consolidation, internal conflict, and scale limitations. Trust-based affinity group organising remains one of the few viable models that doesn’t automatically lead to closure, but that’s a whole other discussion.
The “Dogma” of open, we need to be unapologetically clear, open projects must stay open, or they rot. Closed projects will never be meaningfully opened without collapse. NGOs & fake-open activism serve as control mechanisms, not movements for real change. This is the core challenge we keep running into: Open vs Closed. How do we stop repeating the same mistakes?
Just to remind you, the last 40 years of #mainstreaming has been a #deathcult when you look at our slow drift into #climatechaos, we can’t keep simply repeating this mess.
