Growing the #openweb – Notes for Composting the #dotcons (and growing an #OMN)

Today there are a lot of dishonest people - it’s become the default. Finding someone who is actually truthful is rare. So with this in mind, let’s stop being polite about this, what we’re living inside online right now isn’t “social media.” It’s a managed enclosure - a system designed to extract value, shape behaviour, and concentrate power. It's what I have been saying for the last 20 years. Call it what it is - digital #feudalism - The Lords, the Serfs, and the Server. When […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/growing-the-openweb-notes-for-burning-down-the-dotcons-and-building-an-omn/

Thinking of workshops to run at “Nodes On A Web” #NOAW unconference

Hamish Campbell is a long-time #openweb activist and technologist working on grassroots media and digital commons. He was involved in the early development of #Indymedia and continues this work through projects like the Open Media Network (#OMN), which works on how federated tools and community publishing supports public-interest media infrastructure. His focus is balancing building native platforms and on growing the social culture that makes the #openweb work: transparency, […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/thinking-of-workshops-to-run-at-nodes-on-a-web-noaw-unconference/

OMN: Broken Institutions, and the Need to Rebuild the Commons

For progressive and radical people, one of the central political questions of our time is simple to ask but hard to answer - Why is it so difficult to rebuild the institutions that were destroyed in our #deathcult worship of the 1980s and 1990s? And more importantly why does the impossibility of rebuilding them make it so hard to change the needed balance of power in society? These question matters for working on the future of the society and most importantly the grassroots part of this: […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/omn-broken-institutions-and-the-need-to-rebuild-the-commons/

Disappearing from Search: A personal story about visibility, #dotcons, and the shrinking #openweb

Recently I’ve been doing media interviews - one mainstream piece for a #boatingeurope article coming out in traditional media, and another for the Cherwell student paper in Oxford focused more on biography. Both journalists said the same thing: “It was surprisingly hard to find information about you online.” Around the same time, a boater friend told me something similar. After finally discovering my YouTube channels - which contain thousands of videos and millions of views - they […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/disappearing-from-search-a-personal-story-about-visibility-dotcons-and-the-shrinking-openweb/

This message is a shovel

Ten years ago - and honestly long before that - there were endless conversations on #failbook about how useful it was for campaigning. The dominant view back then was simple: it’s just cat memes, it's just tooling, it isn’t political so we can use it harmlessly. Before Snowden, this wasn’t a fringe view - it was probably a 90% consensus, especially among activists, and #fashionista tech communities. I’m not pointing fingers here, as this was normal. Many of us - including friends and […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/this-message-is-a-spade/

The #openweb is the soil, #OMN the seeds

We are feeling a cultural current many of us recognise but rarely name clearly. A feeling that something fundamental has gone wrong, not just politically or economically, but culturally. An experience that imagination has narrowed, participation has thinned, and people are increasingly pushed into the role of spectators rather than participants in shaping the world. This didn’t appear overnight. It grew out of decades of #neoliberal restructuring that reshaped culture, technology, and […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/the-openweb-is-that-soil-omn-is-the-seeds/

Composting the myths: power, hidden religions, and why the #openweb matters

Let’s look at an example of how belief systems shape political reality. Some people still deliberately conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This confusion isn’t neutral, it shapes how discussions are framed, who gets silenced, and which political paths remain possible. Let’s be clear: Anti-Semitism is racism. It targets Jewish people as a people. It is hate, exclusion, and violence, and it must be opposed wherever it appears. Anti-Zionism is political opposition to a state […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/mess-can-be-less-about-thinking-and-more-about-strategy-understanding-this-we-shift-the-talk-to-focus-more-on-evil/

A good first step to this is in balancing the realisation that we actually have far more direct power to deal with the internal mess than we do over the external #dotcons and their #closedweb “common sense” colonialisation. Compost the blocking, keep the seeds alive, and make space for growth https://hamishcampbell.com/compost-the-blocking-keep-the-seeds-alive-and-make-space-for-growth/

Why mainstream EU tech funding needs counter-currents, why tech activism matters

Across Europe, large-scale “mainstreaming” tech projects are increasingly shaping the future of the digital commons. From infrastructure initiatives to sovereign cloud strategies and federated social technologies, the EU tech stack is becoming more organised, more funded, and more institutionalised. On the surface, this looks like progress. But history suggests that without active counter-currents, #mainstreaming inevitably drifts toward bureaucracy, risk-aversion, and quiet capture by […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/why-mainstream-eu-tech-funding-needs-counter-currents-why-tech-activism-matters/

What if we embrace the idea that technology can escape its creators? #openweb vs #closedweb is the battle for the Internet https://hamishcampbell.com/openweb-vs-closedweb-is-the-battle-for-the-internet/