Disciplined curiosity beats IQ, Oxford

There is a persistent myth pushed in our culture that intelligence - high IQ, academic credentials, elitist education - leads naturally to clear thinking. My organic experience suggests the opposite, what matters is disciplined, skeptical, freethinking curiosity. Without that, intelligence simply becomes a tool for defending whatever assumptions people already hold. This is one of the reasons many academic environments produce people who are, bluntly, credulous. Not because they lack […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/disciplined-curiosity-beats-iq-oxford/

Make some FOSS compost https://hamishcampbell.com/make-some-foss-compost/ The wider culture is drowning in #stupidindividualism. People are burned out by churn, distracted, cynical.

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/

Make some FOSS compost

Twenty years ago the #openweb conversation was simple: build in the open, share the code, grow commons. It wasn’t perfect, but the direction was clear. Now? We talk about “neutral infrastructure” while most energy flows into platforms, APIs, app stores and AI silos owned by the #dotcons. Even many of our own projects quietly depend on their hosting, their identity layers, their distribution channels. We’ve normalised bowing down to closed systems, and we call it pragmatism. But tech […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/make-some-foss-compost/

#FOSS needs to take a social lead

This matters for #FOSS because as if it remains culturally trapped inside the #geekproblem, it becomes socially irrelevant at the exact historical moment it is most needed. Right now, most #FOSS energy still assumes that if you build complex tools, argue narrowly, and keep everything technically “open,” people will come. But only a tiny minority actually want to live the full-stack geek life: self-hosting, compiling, debating licenses, maintaining infra. That path selects for a […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/foss-need-to-take-a-social-lead/

Most people sense that something is off

Meany people see the world degrading, enclosure accelerating. They see climate, politics, media all bending toward extraction. And even when they can see the trajectory, they feel powerless, so they cope by optimise their careers. They scroll. They argue. They consume. They retreat into irony. From birth, we’re trained into one core assumption: There Is No Alternative (#TINA). Not because it’s true, but because every dominant institution reinforces it: Schools train compliance. Media […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/most-people-sense-that-something-is-off/

The #twittermigration, signal vs noise, for rebuilding #openweb culture

Treating the Fediverse as #stupidindividualism is a kind of blindness, yes, individuals matter, but the #Fediverse only works because of shared culture, shared norms, and collective responsibility. Without this social layer, federation becomes fragmentation - lots of voices, but little shared direction to hold together. Since the #twittermigration of a few years ago, many of us are feeling the signal-to-noise shift. New people bring energy, creativity, and different expectations - but also […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/the-twittermigration-signal-vs-noise-and-rebuilding-openweb-culture/

Yes, its messy stepping out of the churn

Everywhere we look - what we see, touch, and use - we are living inside systems shaped by decades of economic and technological assumptions. This isn’t only something happening “out there”. It has been normalised and internalised over the last forty years. The dominance of #stupidindividualism, combined with rigid economic dogma, influenced how we design technology, how we organise communities, and how we imagine progress itself. The outcomes are now starkly visible: #climatechaos, […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/yes-its-messy-stepping-out-of-the-churn/

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/

The rise of #stupidindividualism as a common sense path

Part of the shitty mess we’re in comes from the failure of #DIY culture and the rise of #stupidindividualism as the common sense path. #stupidindividualism is completely unscalable in social terms. It fragments, isolates, and exhausts. That isn’t accidental, it’s a classic divide-and-control strategy of the #deathcult. And we need to consciously step away, and away, and far away from this. An example, over the last 20 years, I’ve answered the same questions individually, over and […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/the-rise-of-stupidindividualism-as-a-mainstream-path/