The advertising model, the platform logic and the attention economy are now getting harder to ignore. A media system that looks like a shopping catalogue with occasional content attached.
The #openweb lesson is that information needs independence from extraction. When every space becomes a marketplace, we lose the ability to build shared culture.
Let's be clear on the background mess, before the personal attacks start, this is not about individuals. It is about patterns, systems and ideas.
The danger is that criticism becomes an #adHominem argument - “you just dislike this because…” - instead of looking at the actual structures being discussed.
The point I am making is that parts of dead #postmodern thinking have ended up fitting inside #neoliberal culture: fragmentation, individual identity, endless discourse and difficulty building any shared collective action.
That does not mean every idea, person or piece of work in those spaces is the same. It means we need to look at how ideas interact with power.
The question is - What helps us build collective capacity in a time of #climatechaos, inequality and the #dotcons mess?
What creates commons? What creates shared action? This is the conversation.
@jmaris
The concern is about what gets selected, what gets amplified, and what gets left out. Funding rewards projects that are already legible to institutions - while native grassroots, messy, community-led work is relay if ever included as it does not fit the expected shape.
The #OMN has always been that we need more open processes:
Transparent decisions.
Community involvement.
Diverse paths.
Accountability.
Funding is a tool - Q. does the tool strengthen the commons?
The issue here is what happens when common sense becomes blind and starts #blocking everything else.
In the #openweb sense, we need multiple ways of knowing - material, cultural, historical, lived - all in conversation with each other.
When knowledge becomes narrow or isolated, it turns into noise. When it connects back to lived reality, it becomes signal again. So the real split is not “who is right”
* theory without action becomes abstraction
* action without reflection becomes repetition
The #OMN problem is how we build shared spaces where these different paths of understanding can meet, argue, and adjust each other - without collapsing into #stupidindividualism and thus institutional gatekeeping.
That’s the work - collective intelligence, not intellectual silos.
Our media, chattering classes and the hard shift to the right has "forgotten" about this. I wrote this 5 years ago -
We need to be honest about the scale of #climatechaos.
We are already around a world heading towards dangerous warming, and current inaction points towards a much worse future. A projected 4°C world is not an abstract number - it means mass displacement, ecological collapse and millions of lives disrupted.
At that scale, continuing as if nothing fundamental needs to change starts to look like a #deathcult.
Respect to the #XR crew for pushing this into public conversation. Sometimes academic and institutional thinking becomes too inward-looking, too focused on debate and frameworks, while the reality outside is already moving.
The social question is obvious - What is not social about millions of people losing homes? What is not political about billions of people being affected?
Yes, we need to understand the class dimension - who caused the crisis, who profits, who pays the cost.
But we also need action, connection and collective thinking. The #openweb lesson applies here too: knowledge only matters when it connects with people and helps build change.
I wrote this 5 years ago before the #Fediverse took off.
We have a class problem that needs attention. A large part of the privileged (empowered) world has spent the last 10+ years posting memes, outrage and identity signals on #failbook - helping build #dotcons into incredibly powerful systems of social control.
This is uncomfortable, but we need to be honest about it. The problem is not just “them” - it is also the participation of people who had the resources, education and influence to build something different but instead fed the systems that now shape public culture.
A class with power has a responsibility to look at how that power is used. The #openweb alternative is not more outrage inside closed platforms. It is rebuilding spaces based on participation, trust, transparency and shared ownership.
We need to look at ourselves and act.
Urgently.
Having a shared pool of hashtags is a way of creating social cohesion and action - a way for people to find each other and talk across #silos. It is a #DIY “search” system, but only if people actually use and share the language.
The #OMN use of hashtags is mostly #nothingnew. I take existing ideas, connect them to outcomes, and create shorthand for conversations that already exist. Examples:
#deathcult = neoliberalism, with the understanding of the real-world outcomes. The metaphor connects a political mindset with its consequences. The historical reference comes from the Irish potato famine - reminder of what happens when a mindset becomes #mainstreaming and millions of people are treated as expendable.
#Geekproblem = a critique of a strand of 20th-century modernism when technical thinking becomes dogmatic. The problem is not “geeks” or technology itself - there is a good side to modernism. The problem is losing the social nuance and turning everything into a technical problem.
#stupidindividualism = thinking about the balance between self and society. It is an outcome of the #deathcult and a symptom of the #geekproblem - the idea that everything can be reduced to isolated individuals instead of relationships and communities.
Could go on…
The point is not the hashtag itself. The point is building shared language, so people recognise patterns, connect ideas and work across the current #blocking silos.
Can we use more #4opens social versions of working models like #NLnet to mediate the corruption and incompetence that dominates when funding becomes too centralised?
The problem is not simply government involvement, public funding is important. The challenge is the structure around it.
Too much bureaucracy slows development, freeze experimentation and turns living projects into paperwork exercises. Too little accountability creates capture, favouritism and closed networks. The balance matters:
The current #EU funding, like #NGI shows the danger when this balance fails - lots of money moving, but the process rewards safe, institutional and already-legible projects that fail rather than messy grassroots innovation that might work.
The #openweb needs funding paths that work more like commons: Open processes - Transparent decisions - Community review - Diverse participation and thus clear accountability.
A useful tool for this is the #4opens that are not just technical principles. They are social infrastructure for keeping power visible and preventing both state and market capture.
For a hashtag to have meaning, it has to become a shared social tool, a way for people to gather around an idea, not just a personal label.
The problem is that inside #stupidindividualism culture, hashtags are treated as acts of individual expression rather than collective meaning-making.
A hashtag should help build a conversation, a network, a shared understanding, Instead, it often becomes just another piece of personal branding and noise.
Without shared social purpose, the tool loses its power.
The #openweb lesson is that meaning comes from communities, not isolated signals.
Otherwise we just end up feeding the #deathcult with more mess and less connection.
There is some talk about recreating radical media networks.
Before we reboot #indymedia or build new altmedia networks, we need some simple, clear understandings of why they failed before.
And I use “simple” and “understandings” deliberately - not “the answer” or one single explanation.
Because the different views of why #indymedia and altmedia failed are not a side issue. They are part of why they failed.
Different groups saw different problems:
Was it technology?
Was it governance?
Was it burnout?
Was it funding?
Was it culture?
Was it the wider shift to the #dotcons?
A reboot cannot ignore tensions. It has to create a bridge between the different lessons, otherwise we rebuild the same problems.
The goal is not to recreate the past.
The goal is to take the useful seeds, compost the failures, and grow something that fits the next phase of the #openweb.
witchescauldron
hamish campbell