An organic intellectual: Please ask questions here
Political and tech - On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over- complexity
#fedi22 #openweb #opensource #4opens #OMN #technology #tech #social #grassroots #boatingeurope #lifeboat #DIY
| Projects | https://unite.openworlds.info |
| Blog | https://hamishcampbell.com |
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?"
#Nicenasty the hidden power of soft obstruction
This mess is something we need to compost - in movements, communities, and alternative projects, we need language to describe the different forces shaping what happens, without shared vocabulary, patterns remain invisible. People experience the same problems repeatedly, but each incident looks like an individual conflict rather than part of a wider social mess making. Within #OMN hashtag story, we already have some useful terms. #nastyfew - power from above. The #nastyfew are the obvious […]https://hamishcampbell.com/nicenasty-the-hidden-power-of-soft-obstruction/
#climatechaos is exposing the contradiction at the heart of capitalism: a system designed around competition and profit struggles when the challenge requires cooperation, long-term planning, and putting survival before short-term returns.
The question is not simply "market vs state". The deeper question is: how do we organise society when facing crises that demand collective action?
History shows that during major emergencies, societies shift into forms of collective mobilisation - redirecting resources, prioritising needs, and acting beyond normal market logic.
The challenge is building those responses without reproducing authoritarian control.
We need systems that are adaptive, democratic, and focused on human needs.
The climate crisis is not only a technology problem. It is a systems' problem.
The dogma of one path: why alternatives, diversity and linking matter more
This toot sparked off some thinking - A blinded assumption of modern Western liberalism has been that there is an automatic connection between free enterprise, liberal democracy and economic and technological progress. The story was simple that open markets create wealth, wealth creates a middle class, the middle class creates democracy, technology and progress naturally follow the same path. This became more than an economic theory, it became a "common sense" worldview - a belief that every […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-dogma-of-one-path-why-alternatives-diversity-and-linking-matter-more/
“WHAT ABOUT HUMAN NATURE?”
A question that ends the conversation before they begin. The assumption is simple: humans are greedy, selfish, jealous - therefore any system that does not harness those flaws will fail.
But this is a very limited view of human nature. Capitalism takes certain behaviours - competition, accumulation, self-interest - and builds a system around rewarding them. It turns these tendencies into the engine of society.
But humans are not only those things. We also cooperate. We care. We share knowledge. We build communities. We create things that have no immediate profit.
The question is not “are humans good or bad?”
The question is: which parts of human behaviour do our systems encourage, reward, and amplify? A system built around nasty will produce different people and relationships than one built around nice.
From an #OMN perspective, this is why alternatives matter. We don't change society by pretending people are perfect. We change society by building structures that help the better parts of human nature grow.
We talk about revolutions through simplified stories: heroes, villains, success, failure.
But real change is shaped by deeper forces - history, economics, ideology, institutions, culture, and the material conditions people are living through.
Often we fall back on comfortable liberal assumptions and narratives instead of asking harder questions about why movements emerge, how they transform, and why their outcomes become something different from their original hopes.
A better analysis needs more mess, not less.
Any understanding of change means looking beyond the slogans and into the systems that shape what becomes possible.
Blinded liberal bias leads to no critical engagement with other ideologies and historical contexts. It flattens difference into moral narrative, and in doing so misses the structural inequalities and power dynamics that shape both revolutionary movements and liberal democracies.
Without that depth, analysis becomes comfort rather than understanding.
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 […]
#OMN (Open Media Network)
witchescauldron