The current generation of activism is crap – fragmented, self-referential, lost in identity wrangles, #NGO capture, and #fashionista online posturing. What can be learned:

Affinity and Trust > Bureaucracy and Branding

The 1990s/2000s alter-globalization movement and early #Indymedia weren’t “organisations,” they were ecosystems. Small affinity groups moved fast, trusted each other, and shared infrastructure without needing a brand deck or a funder’s approval. Lesson we can learn: […]

The current generation of activism is crap – fragmented, self-referential, lost in identity wrangles, #NGO capture, and #fashionista online posturing. What can be learned:

Affinity and Trust > Bureaucracy and Branding

The 1990s/2000s alter-globalization movement and early #Indymedia weren’t “organisations,” they were ecosystems. Small affinity groups moved fast, trusted each other, and shared infrastructure without needing a brand deck or a funder’s approval. Lesson we can learn: […]

In the tech world of social change and challenge, we’re living with a strange imbalance. Too often, the spaces we use and try and build are crowded with useless, self-destructive prats – people more interested in ego, control, and clout than in making anything grow from the roots. And when they do very rearly act, their “help” is often poison: it blocks, slows, and derails.

At the same time, the number of people doing truly useful, collective, grounded work feels small. You can see […]

In the tech world of social change and challenge, we’re living with a strange imbalance. Too often, the spaces we use and try and build are crowded with useless, self-destructive prats – people more interested in ego, control, and clout than in making anything grow from the roots. And when they do very rearly act, their “help” is often poison: it blocks, slows, and derails.

At the same time, the number of people doing truly useful, collective, grounded work feels small. You can see […]

The continuing, talking to legacy alt media people, sparks off clarification. The current conversation comes from the #indieweb, rooted in individualism, the digital mirror of the lone artisan, the self-sufficient homesteader, the coder as sovereign subject. This is not a critique in itself – individualism is a core driver of creativity and experimentation. But taken as the centre of gravity, it is a politics that naturally aligns with capitalism. Each person builds their site, their stack, […]

The continuing, talking to legacy alt media people, sparks off clarification. The current conversation comes from the #indieweb, rooted in individualism, the digital mirror of the lone artisan, the self-sufficient homesteader, the coder as sovereign subject. This is not a critique in itself – individualism is a core driver of creativity and experimentation. But taken as the centre of gravity, it is a politics that naturally aligns with capitalism. Each person builds their site, their stack, […]

In the USA #techshit mess, #OpenAI is busy wrapping itself in the stars and stripes, pushing the fantasy of “democratic AI” while the democracy fig leaf is collapsing. This isn’t democracy – it’s branding. It’s the normal Silicon Valley laundering greed through the American imperialism.

The #nastyfew, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Masayoshi Son, and the Saudis will do fine. They’ll gorge on taxpayer, subsides, pouring billions down the drain, just like the political as normal […]

Most software today = individualist. Even “collective” tools (Fediverse servers, enterprise SaaS, etc.) are just abstractions that aggregate individuals. The default assumption is the liberal subject: the sovereign individual. The infrastructure is built for self-expression, personal feeds, private chats, me, me, me. That’s why for example, when you step into libertarian codebases like #nostr, the smell of #stupidindividualism is everywhere.Communities are treated as “groups of […]

In the USA #techshit mess, #OpenAI is busy wrapping itself in the stars and stripes, pushing the fantasy of “democratic AI” while the democracy fig leaf is collapsing. This isn’t democracy – it’s branding. It’s the normal Silicon Valley laundering greed through the American imperialism.

The #nastyfew, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Masayoshi Son, and the Saudis will do fine. They’ll gorge on taxpayer, subsides, pouring billions down the drain, just like the political as normal […]

Every so often I answer the out reach calls from more traditional alt/progressive media orgs, let’s look at some of the very illustrative “common sense” knock backs. The recent examples are Freedom’s reaction and Good Internet’s submission call – As their reaction is useful to illustrate the fault line of “radical publishing” in a federated media path.

Here’s a sketch of how it can (and arguably should) work if we’re serious about, #openweb, and soft-communing […]

Every so often I answer the out reach calls from more traditional alt/progressive media orgs, let’s look at some of the very illustrative “common sense” knock backs. The recent examples are Freedom’s reaction and Good Internet’s submission call – As their reaction is useful to illustrate the fault line of “radical publishing” in a federated media path.

Here’s a sketch of how it can (and arguably should) work if we’re serious about, #openweb, and soft-communing […]

Most software today = individualist. Even “collective” tools (Fediverse servers, enterprise SaaS, etc.) are just abstractions that aggregate individuals. The default assumption is the liberal subject: the sovereign individual. The infrastructure is built for self-expression, personal feeds, private chats, me, me, me. That’s why for example, when you step into libertarian codebases like #nostr, the smell of #stupidindividualism is everywhere.Communities are treated as “groups of […]

For two decades, activist tech has been stuck in a defensive crouch. We’ve built bunkers (security tools, encryption layers, anonymity networks) but very few bridges. That’s left the field fragmented, insular, and often unattractive to the people we’re supposedly trying to empower.

If the aim is to push social change and challenge rather than just survive, here’s what I think needs building:

#4opens-native infrastructure Open data → not just sharing docs, but making activist […]

Appropriate technology in activist tech means tools built for our real contexts, not for Silicon Valley fantasies or bunker-dwelling paranoia. It’s about lightweight, repairable, understandable systems that communities can actually run, adapt, and share. Right now, the #geekproblem pushes us toward shiny, #dotcons shaped over-engineered toys that serve developer ego more than people and community need or bloated encryption stacks nobody understands, federated protocols that collapse under […]

Activist tech has been stuck in “bunker mode” for 20 years, and the only way out is to start building #4opens native, commons-first systems that store, share, and protect movement knowledge in ways that don’t require a priesthood of insiders to operate.

https://hamishcampbell.com/activist-tech-has-been-stuck-in-a-defensive-crouch/

In an active movement, forum threads, shared docs, livestreams, and photos aren’t just chat noise, they’re collective memory. If we treat them as […]

Most of the mess, and most of the #blocking, comes down to the same old story – ownership and control. Who holds the keys? Who decides? Who gets locked out? Instead of wrestling in that cage, the #OMN takes a simpler path: we walk away.

We put a class of media into the commons, governed openly through the #4opens: open data, open process, open source, and open standards. That means no one can close it down, hoard it, or fence it off for profit. The value comes from the shared pool, not from […]

All too often, the ugliness we face in grassroots spaces wears a smile. It’s smiling-faced vileness: pleasant, agreeable individuals who wield control by blocking dissent, sanitizing movements under the guise of compromise, and maintaining the illusion of consensus. This is especially true in spaces overly tolerant of #NGO-style protocols – those bureaucratic, #fashionista postmodern traps that slowly erode the spark that makes radical communities thrive.

From my work across decades – from […]

It’s good to see more people turning their focus back to the #openweb. For the past five years of the #reboot we’ve been distracted in a signal-to-noise mess from the #fashionistas. That time needs to be over, we need to start looking clearly at both internal rot and the external threats.

A good first step is in balancing the realisation that we actually have far more direct power to deal with the internal mess than we do over the eternal #dotcons and their #closedweb “common sense”. […]

It’s good to see more people turning their focus back to the #openweb. For the past five years of the #reboot we’ve been distracted in a signal-to-noise mess from the #fashionistas. That time needs to be over, we need to start looking clearly at both internal rot and the external threats.

A good first step is in balancing the realisation that we actually have far more direct power to deal with the internal mess than we do over the eternal #dotcons and their #closedweb “common sense”. […]

The geek answer (bad faith or blindness): “If only everyone learned to code, then society would be fairer.”

The activist answer: Code is part of the landscape, but culture, governance, and lived practice matter more. We don’t escape domination by teaching more people to type commands, we escape by changing what we do together with the tools.

Why “teach everyone to code” has become a dead-end slogan – it’s been tried, it’s been funded, and yet it hasn’t shifted power one bit. […]