Mastodawn

Thatcher, Reagan were the wrecking crew: How we keep pushing mess

This story is about the ideology that won. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two politicians on either side of the Atlantic didn’t only win elections, they reshaped what people came to accept as “common sense.” Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States did not invent capitalism’s worst tendencies, but they gave them state power, institutional infrastructure, and ideological legitimacy. What they built was not simply a set of policies, it was a social […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/thatcher-reagan-were-the-wrecking-crew-how-we-pushed-the-current-mess/

#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)

hamish campbell Apr 24

#fashernista describes a person in progressive or radical spaces who prioritises the appearance and aesthetic of activism — the right look, language, and social positioning - over the unglamorous, difficult work of actually building lasting structural change.

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

Search Results for “fashionistas” – #OMN (Open Media Network)

#OMN (Open Media Network)Mar 28

Rebuilding Journalism as Commons (not a product)

https://hamishcampbell.com/news-culture-on-the-fediverse/ It should be obvious that we need a path back to good journalism - journalism that sheds light on facts, connects the dots, and lets people trace those dots back to sources. This is what allows us to share, question, and discuss within our own trusted communities, and then spread that knowledge outward through federation, always linking back to the source. Right now, the #mainstreaming path is broken. It’s sometimes hard for people […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/rebuilding-journalism-as-commons-not-a-product/

Rebuilding Journalism as Commons (not a product) – #OMN (Open Media Network)

#OMN (Open Media Network)Mar 1

Policy churn, selective memory, and the mess on repeat

There’s a familiar pattern in foreign policy debates: outrage at the current regime, amnesia about how it got there. Yes, the current government of #Iran is repressive. It crushes dissent, restricts freedoms, and enforces authoritarian rule. None of that needs soft-pedalling, but if we’re at all serious about understanding the world - rather than just reacting to #fashernista headlines - we also have to look at how situation came to be. In 1953, the democratically elected Prime Minister […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/policy-churn-selective-memory-and-the-mess-on-repeat/

#OMN (Open Media Network)Feb 16

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/

#OMN (Open Media Network)Jan 31

The uncomfortable path

The individual, their freedom, and their capacity for reason are products of social relationships, not independent origins. Society is not built from isolated individuals; individuals arise from shared culture, history, and collective life. As society grows richer and more humane, individuals gain the conditions needed for deeper development and freedom emerges from this shared foundation. What’s really at stake is power. The shift has to be away from private ownership and toward the […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/the-uncomfortable-truth/

hamish campbell Jan 11

We use hashtags as scaffolding for the needed social truth, not as slogans, but as scaffolding, lightweight markers that point to recurring structural issues: #geekproblem #fashernista #dotcons #blocking are not insults. They are shorthand for patterns that otherwise take pages to explain. But, without shared context, they are still easily misread as personal attacks. Again we face #blocking.

#OMN (Open Media Network)Jan 11

From personal mess to shared paths, #OMN in the post-truth world

Consensus matters - but it’s so hard - collective projects, media, activism and infrastructure require a minimum level of agreement about what the problem is. Not total agreement, but enough shared reality to coordinate sustainable action. Without some form of shared external social truth, progressive projects do not move at all, this is not always because people are malicious, but more often because they are no longer standing on any shared ground. This mess, is a problem, as it means […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/from-personal-mess-to-shared-paths-omn-in-the-post-truth-world/

#OMN (Open Media Network)Jan 4

We fucked up… and that matters because we still have agency

Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth: we fucked up the last 20 years of #openweb tech. Not “they” fucked it up. Not only #BigTech, not only venture capital, not only governments and surveillance states. We did, especially those of us who were closest to the tools, the protocols, the decisions - the geeks, developers, architects, and maintainers who shaped how this stuff actually worked in practice. That matters, because it means we still have direct power over what happens next. […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/we-fucked-up-and-that-matters-because-we-still-have-agency/