Mastodawn

#Nicenasty the hidden power of soft obstruction

People think in groups, that's normal. The mistake isn't group thinking itself, it's pretending we're all isolated individuals while still acting through tribes, identities, and social blocs. A lot of today's "common sense" comes from the #stupidindividualism group mindset. We are encouraged to see every problem through individual choices rather than collective realities. The real question isn't "how do we stop group thinking?" It's "what do we do with it?" This mess is something we need to […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/nicenasty-the-hidden-power-of-soft-obstruction/

witchescauldron 3d ago

Existing vocabulary:

#nastyfew - the overlords: tech, business, political power. Works well, already established.

#fluffy - comfortable, non-threatening, conflict-avoiding activism. Well understood in context.

#spiky - confrontational, direct, willing to cause friction.

The gap is something more specific: the person who performs niceness or fluffiness as a *weapon* - who uses social respectability, politeness norms, or community goodwill as a way to enforce conformity, block challenge, and protect their own position. Not the #nastyfew (they're openly powerful) and not simply #fluffy (that's just timid). This is the *vile* fluffy - nice on the surface, actively harmful underneath.

Options:

#nicenasty -. Has rhythm, easy to remember, does the job. The inversion is the point.

#velvetblock - soft surface, hard obstruction. More descriptive of the *mechanism*.

#fluffygate- implies gatekeeping behind a fluffy front. A bit clunky.
#pratocracy - the rule of prats. Funny but loses the specific nice/nasty dynamic.

#softpower - already taken in international relations, would cause confusion.

#vilefluff - pairs well with #nicenasty tag, keep it in the vocabulary

#nicenasty is the strongest - it's immediately, has no baggage, and does what a hashtag should do: compress a complex dynamic into something people recognise and use to organise the moment they hear it.

The question is whether one tag or two. #nastyfew for power from above, #nicenasty for obstruction from within the community itself, #fluffy for the timid. A clean three-part vocabulary?

#OMN (Open Media Network)5d ago

Who controls the story of harm? Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and institutional anti-racism

A reaction to this post - From an #OMN perspective, the current conflict around #antisemitism, anti-racism, and protest politics is not a simple moral disagreement. It is a systems failure in how truth, trust, and harm are processed across society. We are not dealing with one issue, we are dealing with a layered collapse where institutions, media, and platforms struggle to maintain a shared reality that different communities can recognise as valid. The result is not just disagreement, it is […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/who-controls-the-story-of-harm-antisemitism-islamophobia-and-the-politics-of-institutional-anti-racism/

#OMN (Open Media Network)6d ago

The Fediverse’s growing signal-to-noise problem – and who’s causing it

People nowadays are soaked in #stupidindividualism, and the important word on this is hopeless. Not hopeless because people are bad, but because we've spent decades dismantling the social structures that gave us the ability to act together. We know how to consume, react, and perform as individuals, but increasingly struggle to cooperate, organise, and build collective power. A society of isolated individuals is easy to manage and hard to change. There have been a lot of institutional prat […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/the-real-debate-isnt-institutions-versus-communities/

alice 🪞♥️ 🎩🐇May 27

spiky
adjective
variants or less commonly spikey
spikier; spikiest
1: of, relating to, or characterized by spikes
spiky barbed wire
2: sharply irritating or acerbic (as in temper or manner)

#word #spiky #definition #merriamwebster

Kevin Jennings May 14

Porcupine
#photography, #potd2026, #photoaday, #pad2026-134, #porcupine, #woodlandcreatures, #spiky

Kevin Jennings May 14

Porcupine
#photography, #potd2026, #photoaday, #pad2026-134, #porcupine, #woodlandcreatures, #spiky

#OMN (Open Media Network)Apr 27

#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)

#techchurn is the endless cycle of adopting new platforms, tools, and technologies - not because they solve any real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. It burns community trust, institutional memory, and activist energy, while leaving the underlying #nastyfew power structures untouched.https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=techchurn The #OMN uses #stupidindividualism to describe the culturally manufactured habit of prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/omn-grounding-the-roots-as-a-story/

#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story) – #OMN (Open Media Network)

witchescauldron Apr 27

In the #OMN hashtag story, #spiky is the confrontational, direct, and uncompromising tendency within radical movements - the willingness to push back hard against power, name uncomfortable truths, and refuse to sand down political edges for the sake of mainstream respectability and blinded common sense.

.https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=spiky

witchescauldron Apr 22

Balance fluffy and spiky (#fluffy #spiky #debate).

Too fluffy:

nothing gets challenged
toxicity goes underground

Too spiky:

everything becomes conflict
people burn out

You need both, care + challenge and openness + pushback. Held together, not split apart.