The #4opens are simple: open code, open data, open standards and open process. They let you check claims instead of trusting marketing. Can you inspect the software, access your data, move between platforms and see how decisions are made?
Think of it as a trust filter. But openness alone isn't enough: check whether people use the project and whether it's still maintained. #FOSS #OpenWeb #OMN
A recurring #geekproblem - technical people often assume governance can be engineered. But governance is primarily a social process. Technology can support it, but it cannot replace it.
One thing has shifted over the last few years: it's becoming #mainstreaming to recognise that #neoliberalism is a #deathcult.
Endless growth on a finite planet.
Privatised wealth, socialised costs.
Extraction dressed up as "common sense."
Recognising the problem is a start. The harder step is building practical alternatives based on the commons, community and the #openweb.
That's the path of #OMN.
Things are accelerating. From the global lurch toward authoritarianism to deepening #climatechaos, it's understandable to feel overwhelmed.
The answer isn't trying to fix everything. It's staying grounded and building the social and technical infrastructure that can hold the line, nurture trust, and grow what's needed.
“Common sense” says if something has failed for 40+ years, stop repeating it.
#Neoliberal has failed on #climatechange, and it’s still failing now. Rebranding it, softening it, or “warming it up” isn’t a solution, it’s just delay.
We’re living inside systems that clearly aren’t working. At that point, common sense isn’t about defending them - it’s about recognising the failure and trying something different.
More of the same is not realism. It’s inertia.
Good to use the hashtag #climatechaos because this is what we are living through.
Not just “climate change” as a technical issue, but a social, ecological and political crisis.
The challenge is not only reducing emissions - it is rebuilding the ways we organise, share knowledge and act together while the #deathcult systems keep failing.
I've come to think that caring for people requires a degree of resistance to the culture around us. Not because people are bad, but because so much of the dominant culture is built around values that put profit, status, and competition ahead of human need.
In that sense, care becomes a quiet act of rebellion.
#openweb #mutualaid #care #solidarity #deathcult #climatechaos
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is our original virtue. Progress has never come from obedient people quietly accepting the mess. It comes from disobedience, rebellion, and the refusal to let bad systems pretend they are natural.
Being in #Oxford today, I popped into the #OxfordUnion to use a room. Glancing through the term card, it's absolutely vile - and has been consistently so for the two years I've been back in the city.
It's a useful, if deeply dispiriting, exercise in reading the people and place. This is where the next ruling class forms its opinions and sharpens its instincts. On the evidence of what they're platforming, we are not in for a good time.
The #WSocial mess shows what happens when you strip the #openweb of its culture and replace it with PR, funding, and control. A fluff view of current tech we need to compost https://hamishcampbell.com/a-fluff-view-of-current-tech-we-need-to-compost/
#classwar is the ongoing and unacknowledged conflict between those who benefit from and actively reproduce the #deathcult of #neoliberalism - the #nastyfew, managing, and credentialed classes - and the communities, workers, and ecosystems they exploit, a conflict that #mainstreaming culture works to render invisible, reframing systemic dispossession as individual failure.
It's a mess that keeps repeating. And until we break that pattern, we’re stuck. A guide for staying honest and native https://hamishcampbell.com/a-guide-for-staying-honest-and-native/
Stopped going to in-person general tech conferences around 15 years ago - they’d become beyond pointless. Since then, I’ve stuck to more focused online events.
Now heading back to an in-person one. Curious what I’ll actually find.
I have a feeling it’ll be about 75% pointless, 20% narrow geek, academic and #NGO-focused (slightly useful), and maybe 5% - probably less - actually useful.
Let’s see how that shifts after the event.
We have to restructure conferences and events in a more horizontal way as our existing highrackys are infective, unless or parasitic.
The problem of too big, Mastodon https://hamishcampbell.com/the-problem-of-too-big-mastodon/ the is a start of replying to this mess. But it is no way addessing the issues brought up and likly will not. So what can we do to push balence?
#Indymedia for about a decade, the network ran largely on donations and volunteer labour. From that base, it grew to over a hundred sites, with tens of thousands of people contributing. It shows what can emerge from these “free cultures” when they intersect with the right tools and shared purpose.
#YouTube and the #deathcult of “Independent” Media https://hamishcampbell.com/youtube-and-the-deathcult-of-independent-media/ Capitalism cannot tolerate risk, it cannot tolerate diversity, it needs control, predictability, and growth at all costs. And that is the death of any real grassroots media.
#fashionistas conscious or not, is about wrapping the #deathcult in a soft blanket of jargon and “professionalism.” To make exploitation sound like innovation. To turn grassroots messiness into #PR.
And people keep falling for it. Why? Because the #fashionistas sell the feeling of being respectable, of being listened to by power. They dangle the bait of #NGO grants, seats at the table, and photo ops. But what they deliver is silence, blockage, and decay.
Too many “open” tech projects try to model social relations after code workflows rather than shaping code to reflect healthy social processes. Ersatz writing, ersatz governance and the slow death of the #openweb. Compost the Chancers: How Careerists Kill Horizontal Tech Movements https://hamishcampbell.com/compost-the-chancers-how-careerists-kill-horizontal-tech-movements/