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We need an honest conversation

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: […]

⁂ Article

We need an honest conversation

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: […]

Tim Chambers
Evan Prodromou
Tim Chambers and 1 other boosted
@evan yes and I started one here in Vancouver which meets IRL for building the #OpenWeb. It’s third space called #FediCollective inspired by my experience and what I learned at #FediCon2025

For now it’s face to face monthly over coffee but I hope to find some co-organizing help for a global/ online-only membership version so folx can remotely participate in discussions and solutions

https://lu.ma/fedicollective

@evan yes and I started one here in Vancouver which meets IRL for building the #OpenWeb. It’s third space called #FediCollective inspired by my experience and what I learned at #FediCon2025

For now it’s face to face monthly over coffee but I hope to find some co-organizing help for a global/ online-only membership version so folx can remotely participate in discussions and solutions

https://lu.ma/fedicollective

⁂ Article

The stubborn few who show up with shovels, laptops, and trust

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 […]

⁂ Article

The stubborn few who show up with shovels, laptops, and trust

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 […]

⁂ Article

Individualism vs Commons: Why the Fediverse matters, and the Indieweb is legacy

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, […]

⁂ Article

Individualism vs Commons: Why the Fediverse matters, and the Indieweb is legacy

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, […]

⁂ Article

The #dotcons drained the VC swamp and now guzzle from the mainstream trough of corporate socialism

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 […]

⁂ Article

The #dotcons drained the VC swamp and now guzzle from the mainstream trough of corporate socialism

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 […]

⁂ Article

Looking at working with legacy media thinking – silo vs flow

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 […]

⁂ Article

Looking at working with legacy media thinking – silo vs flow

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 […]

"A web that you don’t understand is one that’s not user-driven, or driven by user utility. It’s one where people don’t have agency over the technology they depend upon, and where changes aren’t contrived to address a specific user need.

At the risk of sounding as conspiratorial as the author of the original Dead Internet Theory, I believe the emergence of this incomprehensibility was borne of deliberate decisions made by people at the very top of Big Tech. Furthermore, I believe these people are profoundly anti-person, and see people as resources to be tapped rather than collaborators within a vast, global digital ecosystem.

In many respects, I think this phenomena is down to two things: first, many of the tech products we use were founded by people who were still in the throes of youth, and became billionaires and global tech icons before their brains were even fully developed. They’ve been insulated from people from a young age, never lived a normal life, and they’ve been told — repeatedly — that they are geniuses and visionaries. While I don’t think this explanation excuses any of their behavior, I also think it goes some way into explaining the scarcely-disguised antipathy these people show for their fellow humans.
(...)
The other factor behind this phenomenon is that many of the people running these companies are former management consultants spawned from hell (read: McKinsey) and then set loose on what amounts to “essential infrastructure” for the digital age. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, is a former McKinsey consultant. Sheryl Sandberg, the former Chief Operating Officer of Facebook was one, too.

Management consultants have one job — it’s to recommend strategies to cowardly CEOs that they probably thought of themselves, but are too chicken to put their name behind themselves, that invariably screw over employees, consumers, and the planet."

https://whatwelost.substack.com/p/how-the-internet-died

#DeadInternet#Commons#DigitalCommons#OpenWeb#SocialMedia#AISlop#AI

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Rebalance, by shifting focus from tools to cultures

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 […]