Governance rooted in trust rather than formalized decision-making

In alternative paths and spaces, governance is rooted in trust rather than formalized decision-making. These are environments where shared values, relationships, and practical action matter more than rigid rules or bureaucratic processes. People who come from more institutional or #NGO-style backgrounds default to proposing formal structures – voting procedures, consensus check-ins, rotating chairs, code-of-conduct enforcement committees. While these processes feel necessary to them, in practice they fail in grassroots spaces. Why? Because, fundamentally, nobody has to do anything.

Take a volunteer grassroots run radical media collective, for example. If someone proposes a complex consensus model or tries to enforce step-by-step project plans, it usually ends with endless meetings, unresolved tensions, and burnout. The reason is simple, unlike in paid or hierarchical systems, there’s no leverage to force participation. When push comes to shove, people just walk away.

What happens next is revealing. After the mess, what we might call the composting of the formalized process, people who are still around begin to just do what needs to be done. A few trusted people pick up the shovel, others join in when they see real work happening. Momentum builds through doing, not debating. The group evolves informally, with leadership emerging from action and care, not from mandates. Trust grows as people witness each other’s commitment over time. This informal flow tends to work surprisingly well most of the time.

For example, in the early days of Indymedia, despite various affinity groups having very different political approaches, decisions often came down to who stepped up to do the tech work, write the stories, or run the servers. Trust was built by contribution and consistency. Similarly, in grassroots disaster relief efforts (like Occupy Sandy), attempts to impose centralized control often broke down. But mutual aid networks thrived on trust, initiative, and lightweight coordination, text threads, shared spreadsheets, and informal roles. It was messy, but it worked.

The insight, in trust-based spaces, power flows not from authority or process, but from care, responsibility, and visible action. People trust those who show up and do the work, not those who talk the most or try to control the process. While this model isn’t perfect – and trust can be broken – it often outperforms rigid structures in flexible, values-driven communities.

And then there’s the wannabe #nastyfew – those who feed off control, disruption and ego, often seeking to dominate through manipulation and obstruction. We don’t need to fight them head-on or sink into their drama. In healthy alternative spaces, we learn to step around them, focus on building trust and function, and let their influence compost along with the rest of the mess. In time, as we balance and grow, manage our own lives better, we can feel empowered to push them out of the way, not with force, but with the strength of community, clarity, and shared purpose. They might then become useful in some way?

We need to compost lies, to build #4opens horizontal networks

We are now past the point where the #mainstreaming crew have effectively given up on mediating #climatechaos. What we’re seeing now is ONLY the performance of action – flashy, expensive, technocratic distraction designed to keep business-as-usual afloat a little longer. It’s no not about preventing catastrophe, or even mediating catastrophe, what we have now is managed #PR and keeping in place elitist continuity as this small #nastyfew and their sycophants visibly retreat from the growing mess.

Solutions? Take this example: https://heimildin.is/grein/24581/climeworks-capture-fails-to-cover-its-own-emissions/ Climeworks, a flagship carbon-capture initiative, is so inefficient it fails in offsetting its own emissions. This is the #techshit path they’re backing to get us through the next few centuries? This is beyond a mess, it’s ideological collapse. These fake solutions are the logical outcome of continuing with #mainstreaming #neoliberal ideology, where systemic change and thus challenge is avoided at all costs, and techno-fixes are sold to us by #PR as silver bullets, the #deathcult in action, profit-driven stalling wrapped in light green branding.

Let’s be clear on this: Carbon capture is currently not scalable, not ethical, and not even functional. It is not a climate solution – what it is, is a delay tactic, a hedge for polluting industries. It’s backed by the same #nastyfew class of institutions that told us markets would fix inequality, that endless growth was compatible with ecology, that privatization would bring prosperity. The truth is simple, they, the #nastyfew we keep putting into power, have no real plan. They are playing at engineering the social and ecological collapse while, at this final stage, simply pretending to be managing it.

So what do we do? We #KISS hard stop trusting in any elitist-managed futures. We collectively refuse to be spectators in the mess of the current # mainstreaming path. Instead, we compost these lies and build #4opens, rooted, local, horizontal networks of resistance and renewal. Projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network) don’t pretend to “solve” everything, but they create space for people to act together, share knowledge, mediate and hold power to account, and thus build trust outside the collapsing verticals.

This isn’t about hope in the abstract, it’s about practical solidarity in the spreading ruins. No one is coming to save us, but maybe we can still save each other. Let’s build the seeds of the next world, before this one burns everything down around us.

For an alt #mainstreaming view

OMN, best not to get distracted, this isn’t about purity, it’s about direction

The current wave of #deathcult #mainstreaming of the hard right and “progressive” liberal left is less about progress and more about manipulating the human condition. It doesn’t offer real solutions, what it does do is pushes pacifiers. We live in a world where “common sense” alienation, loneliness, and meaninglessness are manufactured at scale, then sold back to us as control wrapped in empty promises.

Porn is loneliness sold as sex.

Alcohol is escape sold as fun.

Fast food is poison sold as nourishment.

Luxuries are emptiness sold as joy.

Video games are isolation sold as play.

Celebrities are ads sold as role models.

Drugs are numbness sold as happiness.

Social media is likes sold as friendship.

Smoking is addiction sold as relaxation.

Scrolling is distraction sold as downtime.

From the #dotcons

What we’re living through is not simply cultural and ecological decline, it’s the path of the #deathcult, replacing community with consumption, meaning with metrics, and connection with control. This cheap selfishness is the Trojan horse of modern misery. A social drug pushing, dopamine economy, engineered to keep us distracted, unfocused, passive, docile, and obedient, while the real decisions are made elsewhere, by the #nastyfew, elitists, institutions, and algorithms that grow and thrive on our social disconnection.

Where’s the path out of this mess? It’s not always easy, but it is possible. We compost the mess, not by withdrawing completely, but by rebuilding and bridging grounded alternatives – local, collective, messy, real. The #OMN (Open Media Network) is one such seed: a framework for reclaiming media, meaning, and mutual aid from the commodified hellscape of the #closedweb.

To step away from this mess, we don’t need more #dotcons platforms that capture our attention, we need native #openweb spaces that grow humanist trust. We need to re-learn how to talk, disagree, and create together without constantly being sold something in the process.

Best not to get distracted, this isn’t about purity, it’s about direction. When we shift the default away from commodification and toward community, we begin to detox from the #stupidindividualism trap we live in. We can begin to see more clearly, and from there, we build a different kind of world, not based on manipulation, but on meaning.

Let’s start, you need a shovel #OMN

Composting the fiendlyenemy’s

These people are hopeless, in the literal sense of not having any hope.

The #mainstreaming of the #Fediverse is happening. You can see it in many “progressive” info flows, where the chattering classes of tech – academics, #NGO staffers, consultants, and developers with foundations or startup ties – gather to shape the narrative. On the surface, this looks like success: the native grassroots #openweb is being taken seriously. But look a little deeper, and the cracks start to show.

These are the #friendlyenemy – people who share some values, but whose institutional positions and funding streams push them toward compromise. On a good day, they’re allies. On a bad day, they become gatekeepers, smoothing out the radical edge of the #Fediverse in favour of comfort, control, and incrementalism.

You can smell the vertical path creeping in – softly, but persistently. Some voices are given more weight than others. Those who have access to money, credentials, or “platform” get to define the agenda. Those who don’t are politely sidelined. This inequality, dressed up in professional polish and well-meaning governance processes, is not native to the #openweb – it belongs to the broader culture of common sense #neoliberalism that says, quietly but firmly, “power follows money.”

One of the central issues here is signal-to-noise. These folks will acknowledge it if you ask, that real community voices are harder to hear, that grassroots actors are often overlooked, but in practice, they do little to shift the balance. The very structures they rely on (panels, funding calls, curated spaces) reproduce the same inequalities we’re trying to escape.

The “chattering classes” are not a new problem. In every progressive movement, there is a class of well-spoken, well-educated, well-funded individuals who dominate discourse without doing much of the risky, grounded work needed for real change. They often co-opt language, soften radical ideas, and set up systems that make it harder – not easier – for grassroots actors to lead.

So where do we go from here? We don’t reject these people outright, they are part of the mess we must compost. But we do challenge the structures that elevate them above others. We remember that the #Fediverse was born from messy, volunteer-driven experiments, not corporate playbooks. We prioritize horizontal spaces, open governance, and trust-based collaboration. And we keep building the #OMN and other alternative structures that reflect these principles natively, not as afterthoughts.

If we don’t, the #openweb becomes just another place where a different few speak for the many, and we lose the path in #NGO mess and the chance to build something genuinely “native”. What we don’t need is more non-native paths, please, we have enough #techshit to compost already. We do need ideas on how to communicate this to the people who need to hear?

#Fiendlyenemy

OMN, best not to get distracted, this isn’t about purity, it’s about direction

In that mess lies compost…

The current state of tech and activist culture is messy, but in that mess lies compost. From arrogance, capitalism, individualism, and collapsing hierarchies, we have the material to grow something new. The #OMN is a seed for this.

Name the mess, Then root around It

Start by openly acknowledging the systemic failures that have plagued past movements. What we’re composting:

Arrogance & Ignorance: Build a culture of humility and learning, encourage peer mentoring and mutual aid over expertise gatekeeping.
Capitalism: Stay non-market by design, resist startup logic, focus on public goods, not monetization. Use #4opens to maintain transparency, participation, and trust.
#StupidIndividualism: Create interdependence to rebuild collective thinking with small working groups and visible shared goals.
Hierarchy Creep: Default to horizontal governance but defacto acknowledge and design for balance leadership, with clear boundaries that keep accountability rooted in community.
Emotional Disconnection: Lean into affective direct action by highlighting lived experiences and personal narratives in media and organizing.

Compost isn’t trash – it’s transformation.

Strengthen a clear, simple core: the #4opens

The #OMN should live and breathe the #4opens:

Open Data – All published media and metadata is accessible.

Open Source – Tools and platforms are forkable and transparent.

Open Process – Governance and decision-making are documented and participatory.

Open Standards – Interoperability with the wider #openweb and Fediverse is core.

This offers a solid, non-dogmatic foundation. It avoids reinventing the wheel, and builds trust – a scarce resource in today’s messy web.

Start small, root deep

Avoid the trap of scaling before grounding by prototyping local hubs, for example with the #OMN projects, support a few active collectives already creating grassroots media. Use these as seeds: real people, telling real stories, using simple #KISS tools. Prioritize tools people already use, like Fediverse platforms.

Create a “Trust Mesh,” not a monolith, the #OMN is not a centralized service. It’s a mesh of trusted nodes.

Use reputation by proximity – if I trust a node, and they trust another, I can begin with soft trust. Encourage federated moderation – each node governs itself, but shares back its reasoning, bridging dialogue over policing. Use hashtags as protocols – this is the native language of grassroots media. Make this a cultural moment – not just a policy critique.

In Summary, compost the rot, don’t hide it, build with: Trust not control – Cooperation not competition – Commons not commerce – Emotion not abstraction. And always – think globally, act locally. The #OMN can’t “win” the game. What it can do is change the rules by being rooted, open, and compost-powered. Let’s get planting.

You don’t need to be a coder or activist to help grow this compost-powered future. Start by talking openly about the mess, with your friends, at work, online. Share radical but grounded ideas like the #4opens. Support or volunteer with grassroots media projects. Use ethical tech alternatives like the Fediverse instead of #dotcons. Practice mutual aid in your community – give and receive help with no strings attached. Turn down the volume on #stupidindividualism and listen to others. Most importantly, show up with humility, curiosity, and a willingness to build together. The world won’t change overnight, but let’s start planting.

Neoliberal’s shift to capture the state socialism shift

A bitter taste – the kind you get when you realise you’re seeing a power grab in real time. Our #neoliberal elitist are shifting, the poster figures for market-friendly economic orthodoxy, are starting to shift their tone. There’s something new in the air – old-school #neoliberals are beginning to talk like state socialists. But please don’t be fooled that this isn’t a shift in values, it’s not, rather a repositioning of the same elitist interests to dominate the new economic order that’s growing from the rot of the old one.

The current #neoliberal pivot, from market to managed, is “our” old crew who push competition economics and consistently advocating for market-driven solutions, even when those markets were clearly broken. With this shift, we need to keep focus that their reputation was built within the framework of capitalist orthodoxy. But now, some of these people are stepping into new territory, talking about state intervention, industrial policy, and even strategic autonomy. These used to be the language of the left, of social democracy, of planned economies. So what is pushing this change?

It’s not that this cohort have discovered justice or ecological sanity, rather it’s that the ground has shifted beneath them. #Neoliberalism as a political project has lost legitimacy, the #deathcult is now exposed, and the wannabe ruling class is scrambling to reassert control over the new opening terrain, it’s a power grab.

This is agenda capture in motion, with industrial policy playing as elitist tool, Industrial policy was a dirty phrase in neoliberal circles just a few years ago – but it’s now being repurposed, not to serve the public good, but to maintain statues in a world where market mechanisms are crumbling.

Take the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act or Inflation Reduction Act. They pour billions into infrastructure and green tech, but who benefits? U.S. corporations, defence contractors, and the same fossil-capital interests that got us into this mess. In the EU, we see “strategic autonomy” used to justify subsidies and state intervention – but always within a closed circle of corporate lobbyists, elitist economists, and blind technocrats.

This is an old-failed path of state socialism without democracy. And yes, this is likely to look more like the war economy of the Soviet Union than anything rooted in the emancipatory traditions of the progressive 20th-century. I am not arguing that we don’t need this “war economy” in the era of #climatechaos, but we need to do this better, learning from the failed paths rather than simply repeating them, we need emanatory, rather a period of emergency capitalism and permanent crisis management. The climate emergency will demand massive state action, but without genuine democratic governance and accountability, this action will be captured and centralised in the normal authoritarian structures.

Think: Centralised rationing systems controlled by corporations – Surveillance-enabled “efficiency” models – Green militarisation under the guise of resilience – Digital ID and biometric control for access to services. This change won’t be call “socialism” – but functionally, it mirrors the command economies of 20th century wartime economics.

The difference is that profit remains intact. The commons are still enclosed. The decisions are still made in boardrooms and policy panels, not town halls. From think tanks to tech panels: The same faces with new masks. It’s worth looking for where this shift is happening:

Former neoliberal economists are rebranding as “climate realists” or “strategic planners.”

Think tanks like the Centre for European Reform or Bruegel now host panels on “industrial strategy” filled with the same voices that once evangelised deregulation.

Policy influencers like Larry Summers or Ursula von der Leyen are flipping scripts — talking about “resilience,” “reducing dependencies,” and “national missions.”

The same control, reframed to fit a shifting world of crisis. These people have already failed so we need to be sceptical of them being the solution in this shift, some might have changed, the majority have not.

What we actually need is to clearly step away from this mess, we need, compost, not co-option. We need to be clear-eyed and unapologetic, this elitist pivot is not a win. It is an attempt to capture of the necessary transition. It is not enough to shift the language from free markets to state planning. We need democratic control, radical transparency, and genuine ecological justice. We need the #4opens – not just as a tech principle, but as a social and economic one.

Found this on the subject

Because if we don’t fight for it, we will end up with a high-tech version of Soviet centralism run by BlackRock and Amazon, a closed system dressed in green, where the people remain voiceless, and crisis justifies every control. This is aggressively stealing the agenda. If we’re serious about real change, we have to call this out. Loudly. Early. And with enough compost under our boots to grow something better.

World of war – The global battle for industrial supremacy

The Said Business School is a temple of the #deathcult

The Philosophers Talking About AI: Context, Flow, and the #geekproblem

This is touching on the event as had to leave early.

I was recently at a talk from the Oxford University series, “The Philosophers Talking About AI”. There were some underlying themes that are deeply relevant to how we think about privacy, information, and our current techno-social mess.

Action vs. Paralysis, the talk opens with the tension between the strong and weak drives of human decision-making. This plays out in a constant oscillation between conversation and paralysis. Philosophically, we get stuck, debating endlessly, without acting. And in ethics, this inaction can be dangerous. If we don’t decide and act, we leave the field open for others to impose their decisions on us.

Rethinking Privacy. One of the more nuanced ideas from the talk is a definition of privacy not as secrecy, but as appropriate information flow.

"Privacy is not control, nor hiding – it’s about the right information flowing in the right way."

This is a key shift. Secrecy is often anti-human – it disrupts the flow of information, which is essential to human life and community. Instead, privacy is about appropriateness, about understanding which flows are legitimate in which contexts.

So what determines “appropriateness”? Social context. Contextual Integrity. Privacy, then, depends on social spheres, each defined by particular goals, values, and purposes. In each sphere, there are different expectations for how data should flow. These expectations aren’t always formal rules, but norms, often invisible until they’re violated.

The speaker brings in the idea of the transmission principle – that information shouldn’t flow without the right kind of consent or context. While consent matters, it’s not the only thing that legitimizes a flow. There are many transmission predicates in society that allow information to move in meaningful, appropriate, and socially beneficial ways.

But here’s the mess: our (post)modern systems, especially those built by geeks, often ignore or misunderstand this. This ties directly into what I often call the #geekproblem. The problem is that geeks, driven by abstract logic and rigid notions of control, block too many flows. They implement blanket rules and dogmatic blocks rather than engaging with messy human norms. Worse, they often start fighting among themselves about which blocks should exist, creating even more social dysfunction.

They don’t see the richness of the social world. They try to “fix” it by hard-coding overly simplified versions of reality into software, creating systems that are brittle, alienating, and to often oppressive.

This has real consequences for the #openweb and our attempts to build alternatives. If we don’t get privacy right – if we don’t understand the role of context and legitimacy in data flows – we’ll just reproduce the same broken #dotcons models we’re trying to replace.

Beyond policy and control, most privacy policies today are useless. They reduce privacy to a box-ticking exercise, just “terms and conditions” of control. But this is a dead end. Real privacy is contextual. It involves relationships between: The subject – The sender – The recipient – The nature of the information.

To build humane technology, we need to embed all these values into our tools and processes. That means ditching secrecy-as-default, dropping the obsession with control, and embracing appropriate social information flows.

#KISS #Oxford #talk

The current “debate” about AI is a distraction #KISS

Metaphors matter, composting the current paths in #AI

World of war – The global battle for industrial supremacy

I just was at a talk from the Oxford University. The rise of economic nationalism and the return of state power – While the speakers skirt around key terms like socialism and justice, the implications of what’s discussed are clear, the #neoliberal era is ended, and what comes next is still being shaped.

For the current #mainstreaming the rise of Economic Nationalism is a reaction to the rise of China, the talk explores how China’s rise has catalysed a shift across the rich world – from the free-market dogma of the last 40 years to a new age of “industrial policy”. In essence, the old exploitive game of “global competitiveness” is giving way to nationalist state planning, even if the elitists are reluctant to call it mixed economy, social democracy or even socialism.

In the U.S., this has taken the form of tariffs and export controls, which, let’s be honest, function as subsidies for American corporations. In the #EU, there’s similar movement, more tentative, but real. One key example is the #ReArm Europe military initiative: a push toward industrial resilience, framed through the lens of security but rooted in state-led economic intervention. An example is https://cristinacaffarra.blog/2025/02/03/we-have-to-get-to-work-and-put-europe-first-but-we-are-late-terribly-late/ in tech.

This Western new wave of competitive protectionism benefits the rich nations who already have resources, capital, and infrastructure. Developing countries? They’re simply left behind, again. But, we might actually be on a different path, this time, China’s alternative model is working, the Global South is watching, and in some cases, benefiting.

The result? We’re seeing cracks in the global order that’s been in place since the 1980s – a system that privileged Western elitists while systematically extracting from the rest. A new international economic order may be emerging, and it might – on balance – benefit the South more than the North?

In the USA we see two faces of the same coin, it’s worth noting that both Biden and Trump have walked similar paths. Biden sells this industrial policy as justice-driven, future-focused action. Trump dresses it in nationalist bluster. But the outcome is largely the same: a shift away from free markets and toward controlled, strategic planning – just with different elitist backers benefiting behind the thin curtains.

This opens up the #deathcult for a need for reckoning. Here’s where we need to be blunt: the last 40 years of #neoliberalism – of #mainstreaming market worship – was a mistake. A disaster. A #deathcult. It failed to deliver for most of the people in the west, and was a disaster for the rest of the world. And now, with #climatechaos accelerating, that failure is no longer academic – it’s existential. The current shift to state-led green transitions is a tacit admission that capitalism, cannot handle any future. To shift this, we need strong, progressive states, and we need them fast.

Yet nowhere in the talk does the word socialism come up, despite the obvious trajectory. Nor do we hear the word justice, even though that’s what’s at stake. This silence says a lot about #mainstreaming transitioning. But here’s a constructive provocation: where are the academic voices of responsibility?

On this subject I have a plan – Think Globally, Act Locally – in Oxford and similar elitist institutions, generations of economists, political scientists, and technocrats trained the youth to believe in the religion of markets. Now this mess making is over, can we now ask – kindly but firmly – for these same institutions to stand up and apologize? Not in shame, but in honesty.

Apologize for worshipping failed ideologies. For pushing a worldview that has brought us to the edge. And crucially, explain why they were wrong and what they’ve learned. This act alone could unfreeze some of the apathy among the youth – many of whom intuit the coming crisis but feel trapped in a world still pretending business-as-usual is viable.

We are In transition, yes the language in the talk is still dressed in #neoliberal garments, but the substance is moving toward planned economies, redistributed investment, and long-term thinking. It’s socialism in practice, even if not yet in name. So let’s get on with composting the ideology of the last 40 years. Let it rot, fertilize something new with what’s left. It’s past time to act. Not with nostalgia, but with clarity.

#Oxford #talk

The Said Business School is a temple of the #deathcult

What we need is useful compost layer’s for growing native projects

Compost, not illusions, is a first step – A radical look at “light green” tech – For a second step we need a useful compost layer for growing native projects, like the #OMN. What we currently have in most so-called “green technology” promoted through #mainstreaming and #fashernista narratives is not ecological in substance – it’s performative environmentalism, built on omission, distortion, and branding. To help make sense of this mess, let’s use the lenses of the #4opens, the #geekproblem, and the broader #openweb.

The mess is “green” as branding, not substance. Most of today’s #mainstreaming “green” tech, like, electric vehicles (EVs), solar panels, wind turbines – is “green” in aesthetics, not in impact. These are products sold as solutions, but they’re too often rooted in the same extractive, centralized, and opaque paths and systems that caused the problems in the first place. This is the heart of the lie we need to compost, as the needed social change cannot grow from toxic soil, no matter how glossy and plastic the flower appears. If we ignore the roots, we get more illusions.

Watch this critique: The True Cost of Green Tech (YouTube)

The #OMN critique is to move past the false solutions and the broken paths. Yes, light green solutions pushed by institutions and NGOs aren’t inherently bad technologies – but their production, distribution, and governance models are deeply flawed. They violate every principle of the #4opens:

Open data: No honest accounting of full lifecycle impacts.
Open source: Dominated by proprietary, locked-in systems.
Open process: Controlled by corporations and states, with no meaningful public input.
Open standards: Sacrificed for monopolistic vertical integration (e.g., Tesla).

The result is more #techshit – waste and violence hidden behind shiny #PR branding. Even our weak #NGOs point out the brutal costs: resource extraction (cobalt, lithium, rare earths), labour exploitation (child and Uyghur forced labour), and environmental dumping. These costs are buried beneath greenwashed PR aesthetics, making them palatable to consumers but invisible to our shared, and needed critique.

The #geekproblem, the “problem” in much geek culture, is tech as saviour, this is the belief that technology itself is inherently progressive. This takes us down the paths where proposed “fixes” like nuclear follow the same flawed paths: centralized, capital-intensive, top-down systems cloaked in the language of innovation. It’s new wrapping, same old crap.

This is not a path to climate justice. It’s a continuation of the #deathcult – digital colonialism powered by extraction, slavery, and silence. No genuine social or ecological transformation can grow from this poisoned foundation. Where the real cost of “green” tech is not just ignored, it’s deliberately silenced. This silence isn’t accidental; it’s structural. The narrative that we can “buy better things” and consume our way out of crisis is a pacifying lie. It sells comfort, not change.

True ecological technology must be social first. It should grow from transformation, not transaction. We need to compost the lies to grow real alternatives. We must compost the #mainstreaming myths-this is the role of #hashtag stories.

There are meany paths to take, the one I focus on is reclaiming small-scale, peer-produced infrastructure. Using the #4opens to demand transparency, accountability, and participation. Solar panels and EVs have a role, but only when embedded in a radically #degrowth paths: Open governance (#OGB), local, decentralized production (right to repair, community assembly), circular economy (reuse, repurpose, recycle), humanism as non-negotiable (no slavery, no offshoring of harm). It’s a simple, not to say old-fashioned idea of humanistic progress, maybe we can do this better this time, I hope.

Conclusion, please #KISS the illusions goodbye, build the compost heap. Now also, please remember, we are not against technology – we’re against the lies that accompany it. As long as we keep lying about the nature of change, we cannot begin the real work. We need fertile ground – a compost layer for native projects like the #OMN – to push openness and cultivate the genuine ecological thinking we need to grow. It’s way past time for people to lift their heads from worshipping the #deathcult and stop being prats about this.

Enclosure of the openweb

This spirit of the early internet and #WWW – sharing, remixing, collectively creating – is the heart of what we once called the #openweb. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a space of possibilities, commons, where you could take what you needed and leave something behind, hyperlink by hyperlink. The tools were open – #RSS feeds, #APIs, #XMPP, #indymedia were built to bridge between ideas and movements, not walls of monetized algorithmic sludge we have today.

But the #dotcons came. They fenced in the wild garden. What we’re living through now is a digital version of the enclosure of the commons, a #neoliberal land grab dressed in Silicon Valley T-shirts. Just like in 16th-century England, they drew arbitrary lines around our #4opens shared land (data, conversation, culture), declared it private property, and shut the gates. And we, the people, got algorithmic slop in return.

The comparison isn’t metaphor – it’s literal. Just as the landed gentry stole the commons to fuel the industrial revolution, the tech gentry stole our digital commons to feed surveillance capitalism. They did it through legalese, marketing BS, and brute force. We were left outside the firewalls, told to be thankful for “free” services while they harvested our metadata lives to sell back to us as advertisements and social control.

The #techbros didn’t invent this theft. They just updated the tools, the same ideological mess that displaced peasants from their land now displaces communities from their networks and platforms, kills independent sites, closes APIs, and locks away archives behind paywalls. Twitter’s 2023 shutdown of free API access? A textbook enclosure. Hundreds of # fashionista grassroots tools and bots vanished overnight, #Techshit at its most brazen.

And then there’s #RSS – the veins of the old web. Stabbed slowly. First by Facebook, then by Google. For the #fashernistas, the blade fell hardest in 2013 with the death of Google Reader, a quiet coup that pushed most of us into the fenced-off gardens of algorithmic consumption we live so much of our lives in today. The commons didn’t vanish; it was actively destroyed, under the smog of monetization, “engagement,” and corporate “safety.”

This isn’t #progress, it’s theft. The same kind that wears the mask of legitimacy because lawyers and lobbyists made it look neat on paper. The reality is old, it’s a #classwar fought with code instead of clubs, and it’s won because we stopped remembering what common “land” even looked like.

But not everything is lost. The #Fediverse, the #OMN (Open Media Network) still plants seeds in the cracks. #Wikidata, #OpenStreetMap, the #ActivityPub protocol, these are digital hedgerows that survived the scorched earth. They are messy, collaborative, and unmonetized. That’s their strength, that’s what the #fashernistas to often don’t get – they can’t sell what they can’t own.

The #geekproblem here is fatal, in both the grassroots and the #dotcons, too many technologists are blind to the politics in their code. In the #mainstreaming, they build better tools for corporations that destroy the commons. Over and over again. The solution? For the grassroots coders, compost the #techshit, seed something else, and reclaim what was always ours. As when we lift the lid, the #dotcons mess our unthinking #fashernistras, #NGO geeks call the internet is simply a thin veneer on top of what is actually ours, the #openweb

Let’s stop being polite about this. The #closedweb is a crime scene. The platforms we rely on are bonfires of common culture, feeding the engines of the next wave of control. If we don’t remember how we got here, we can’t get out. It’s time to say it plain: The privatized web is a #deathcult, and only a #4opens reboot can bring life back.

An article: https://johl.io/blog/enclosures-and-the-open-web

The West, Russia, and the madness of mutual sabotage

With the current hard move to the right let’s look at the current mess more clearly, we’re watching the slow-motion implosion of geopolitical sanity, driven by a feedback loop of paranoia, expansionism, and elitist delusion all round. I will use an example, the Russian neo-monarchy we installed with the fall of the #USSR is both authoritarian and insulated from reality, it harbours a deeply ingrained – but not entirely unfounded – fear, that the West wants to partition and neuter Russia, to finally break its imperial spine and sideline it permanently from global power.

The response to this is predicable, the wannabe Russian Empire moves to lash outwards. Expand. Destabilize. Subvert. Sabotage. Whether in Ukraine, Syria, Africa, or via bot farms and proxy networks, the strategy is the same, externalize the crisis, manufacture mess, weaken the “enemy”, and in doing so, fortify internal control. It’s a survival tactic wrapped in a brutal shell of historical grievance and nationalist myth-making.

But, what we do, in the West, in response is the real insanity, our response mirrors the very thing they fear. The West’s led by Washington #neoliberal hawks, Eurocentrists, and the ever-profitable security-industrial complex – isn’t, peace, trade, exchange, strategic clarity, de-escalation, or rebuilding multilateral resilience. No. It’s tit-for-tat sabotage, economic warfare, arms races, and public rhetoric that edges ever closer to advocating regime change, disintegration, and total subjugation. The wet dream of the #nastyfew think tank ghouls, a post-Russia carved up, pacified, and absorbed into the #closedweb of western corporate “freedom.” they tried it after the breakup of the #USSR, and now we repeat the same crap plan.

Do we really think it helps to become the very monster the Russians, are not without foundation, paranoid about, and already believe us to be? Yes, we do keep repeating this path of endless #fuckwittery feedback loops, imperial reaction and counter-reaction has been the geopolitics of the #deathcult for way too long. The world we have now is a paranoid empire meets a suicidal empire, Russia, trapped in its authoritarian echo chamber, acts from a place of imperial insecurity. It remembers the Cold War, NATO’s slow crawl eastward, the gutting of its economy in the ’90s under western advisors. Its fear is rooted in historical trauma, yes – but also in hard analysis. The West has pushed precisely the policies Russia fears.

Instead of “us” building genuine alternatives – non-aligned diplomacy, economic multipolarity, climate cooperation – we escalate. We double down. We treat their paranoia not as a challenge to deconstruct but a justification for more militarism, more sanctions, more media war, more fantasy of breaking the Russian state entirely. This is not a path to peace, this is not a path to any humanistic justice, this is mess-making on a planetary scale. And in the era of #climatechaos, where we face shared planetary collapse, it’s more than just dangerous, it’s become the hard right’s apocalyptic fantasy of civilizational suicide.

Let’s be very clear, this cycle is not driven by “the people.” It’s the #nastyfew, the hard-right elitists, ideologues, the nationalist technocrats and billionaire opportunists who feed on fear and profit from instability. In Russia, they wear the mask of Orthodox autocracy. In the West, they wear the suits of think tanks and boardrooms. But their vision is now the same, control through collapse.

They aren’t interested in saving the world, they want to own the wreckage. They’re building bunkers while the rest of us fight over ruins. They’re funding war while cutting climate adaptation, speak of “freedom” while mining the last drops of oil and blood. This isn’t realism, it’s delusion, this isn’t defence, it’s offence by inertia, this isn’t strategy. What it is, is the new #deathcult replacing the dead old one of 40 years of neoliberalism.

Where now? What we don’t need is more war games, we don’t need to break Russia or “win” against China. A key though is we don’t need to be right – we need to be alive, and for that we need radical de-escalation, grassroots diplomacy, and growing planetary solidarity. The answer to paranoid imperialism isn’t more imperialism – it’s compost. Yes, compost. We need to take this mess, this decaying structure of late-stage empire, and break it down into something fertile.

We need to stop thinking like empires and start thinking like ecologies. Build networks, not states, trust, not surveillance, infrastructure of care, not bombs, media for truth, not narrative warfare. We can’t outsource survival to failing nation-states, or hand over justice to militaries. What we need is a grassroots push to step outside the spiral. The #openweb gives us a glimpse of this possibility: federated, decentralized, trust-based networks that grow from the ground, not fall from the sky. What comes next depends on what we build in the growing cracks. Because we can’t keep feeding this mess.

Why the Russian constitution matters: the dark arts of constitutional law

We do need tools to share to help people on the path back onto the #openweb

The struggle to grow the #Fediverse and this #openweb reboot has never been about technology alone – it’s always been about narrative, framing, and belonging. If we want people to step away from the toxic silos of the #closedweb and #dotcons to step into something better, we need more than protocols and servers – we need invitations.

That’s why it’s good to see the redesigned onboarding experience at Fedidb.com/welcome. I had a quick look at it, and it seems to be a “native” practical tool we can share and use, not just as a gateway into the #Fediverse, but as a wider entry point into the ecosystem of the #openweb.

For too long, onboarding to the Fediverse has been a confusing, even alienating experience for newcomers. Too much #NGO pushing of “branding” too many choices, not enough context. Geeky terms like “ActivityPub” and “instance” are clear to us, but for the uninitiated, they create a wall instead of a welcome. We need more and better, Fediverse onboarding to give new people a structured, thoughtful, and human-first guide to joining this #humanistic diverse and decentralized space.

But here’s the real value, it’s not just technical hand-holding, it’s about cultural translation. This is why language matters: #Fediverse vs #Openweb. While “Fediverse” is a useful term, it points to specific protocols and tribal communities – it doesn’t always resonate beyond our circles. It can sound cryptic, niche, or overly geeky. That’s why it’s helpful to expand the use of the term #openweb alongside it.

The #openweb is bigger than any one path. It’s a historical vision – built on a history of cooperation rather than control, of federation instead of centralization. It’s the contrast to the #closedweb, where corporate algorithms shape what we see, and people and community freedom is traded for convenience and profit. Framing this as a cultural and political distinction helps move the conversation from tech choice to social movement.

Using #openweb helps make the values of the Fediverse legible to a wider public, openness, transparency, interoperability, and community control. And it opens the door to include other aligned projects – peer-to-peer tools, decentralized publishing, grassroots governance – that don’t neatly fit under the “Fediverse” label, but absolutely belong in the same garden.

Tools alone aren’t enough – But they help. Let’s be clear, no onboarding tool, however well-designed, can solve the challenges we face in building a vibrant, humane alternative to the #dotcons. This is not a tech issue – it’s a social, political, and cultural one. But non branded tools like this matter, are a good step, because they lower the barrier to entry. They help us welcome people in, especially those who want to leave the toxic platforms behind but don’t know where to go or how to start.

We should treat this onboarding page as compost, part of the broader cycle of growth. It helps new people take root, connect, and contribute. And as they do, we need to support them not just technically, but socially, through trust-based networks, clear values, and open processes. This is how we build resilience. This is how we grow real alternatives.

So yes, this is something we can share. With friends, with family, with disillusioned Twitter refugees or burned-out Instagram doom scrollers. But more than that, it’s something we can build on. The #Fediverse is a living, breathing project. The #openweb is the soil it grows in.

Share the link: https://fedidb.com/welcome