Let’s have a look at an example of the new mess we’re facing: JD Vance – author, venture capitalist, convert Catholic, and now Vice President. He’s not a Reaganite libertarian, nor a traditional conservative. Instead, Vance represents something more dangerous: a dogmatic ideology, born in the boardrooms of tech billionaires and the seminaries of Catholicism, forged on in the #dotcons, and now pushing American politics into very dark territory.

This isn’t politics as usual. It’s not even populism any more. While there’s grifting (of course) and plenty of weirdness to laugh at, Vance and his fellow travellers are deadly serious. They are actively wielding state power – not to protect liberal values, but to bury them. They’ve declared the Enlightenment dead. The compromise that held Western democracies together for centuries? Thrown out. In its place, they want to sack the referee and replace him with a priest, a general, and a patriarch. All under the rallying cry of “Culture in Crisis.”

Vance’s origin myth is the breakdown of the American family, as told through Hillbilly Elegy – addiction, poverty, and social collapse in the white working class. That story pushed him through the Thiel-funded ranks of the #techbro elitists. But he didn’t stop at diagnosis, the next step is to legislate culture, to grasp state power and use it to impose the narrow vision of the #nastyfew onto everyone else.

This isn’t nostalgia and posturing any more. This is a fully operational political project, rooted in religion, nationalism, and family. It’s about dismantling the old #mainstreaming and replacing it with a fortress ideology. Neutrality in courts and bureaucracy? Gone. Education? To be weaponised. History? To be rewritten. Opponents? To be punished. This is a hard right revolution, bulldozing the old order as a prerequisite for building the new. “The System Is the Enemy.” Libertarian economics are dismissed as rootless; personal liberty as decadent. Academia, journalism, and law are painted as captured by postmodern “wokeism”, a hegemonic structure that must be ripped out like a tumour.

This isn’t rhetorical. It’s actionable. Seize the Ford Foundation’s assets. Fire the civil service. Override the courts. Vance quotes Andrew Jackson: “The Chief Justice has made his ruling; now let him enforce it.” This is a revolution, not of the people, but for the #nastyfew. At its heart is a revival of ethno-nationalism. Where American identity once leaned on shared civic values, not shared blood, they now champion a mythic “homeland” of “legacy Americans” and cemetery plots. A culture you must inherit to belong. Don’t have children? You’re a “childless cat lady”, a punchline and a pariah. Public servant without offspring? Then you have “no commitment to the future.” It’s an ideological border wall: to belong, you must believe in the right God, live in a traditional family, and descend from the right people. Everyone else? Suspect, and/or disposable.

This isn’t simple reactionary, it’s counter-Enlightenment. The appeal is clear: it speaks to the spiritual hollowness of late capitalism – to the loneliness, the nihilism, the disconnection. And liberal technocracy, the ruling ideology of the last 40 years, has failed utterly to address this. The #deathcult of managerial neoliberalism left a void. Now the New Right wants to fill it, with hierarchy, obedience, and repression.

But it should be obvious that this right-wing “solution” is catastrophic. Meaning cannot be mandated by the #nastyfew. Culture cannot be enforced by fiat. Pluralism is not a flaw, it’s the messy reality of modern life. Pretending you can erase difference and enforce unity is delusional. Movements that try always end in repression, exclusion, and worse. What begins as a culture war ends as a culture purge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgE6y6E1lZQ

So what can we do? This is where the #OMN – the Open Media Network – matters more than ever. Not to magnify the mess, but to mediate it. The #OMN is a native, grassroots alternative to both the hollow liberal centre and the authoritarian push of the right. It doesn’t build through imposition. It builds through federation, dialogue, and trust. Our path is transparent, accountable, and open-source – not sacred, secret, and top-down. Where the hard right sees liberalism’s emptiness and tries to fill it with obedience and dogma, we recognise the same void, and fill it with commons, care, and co-creation.

Please, don’t worship either the old or the new #deathcult. The #MAGA movement preaches high-control authoritarian ideology with high priests in expensive suits. This is why #openweb projects like #OMN matter more than ever. Because if we don’t build our own rooted, federated commons, our own peer-to-peer culture of meaning, then yes, the future will be built by people like JD Vance and the rotting Trump dynasty. And it won’t be a future you can simply opt out of. So stop dithering. Don’t be a prat about it. The time to build the alternative is now.

https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

Throwing ideas into the air to see where they land, this is a sketch, not a blueprint. A thought experiment. But if we’re serious about rebooting the #openweb, challenging #mainstreaming, and building alternatives to the failing capitalist status quo, we have to start somewhere. So let’s ask: what does a world built around the #4opens actually look like?

We’re talking about a soft move away from capitalism, not an apocalyptic collapse or utopian leap, but a pragmatic, grounded shift in how we live, relate, and build together in the digital era. A society governed by openness, not profit. A future rooted in collaboration, not control.

1. The End of Money as the Primary Motivator

In a #4opens world, exchange is no longer driven by the blunt instrument of money. The logic of scarcity fades when information is abundant and freely shared. With open data and transparent process, value can be tracked, distributed, and balanced – not hoarded.

Imagine a path where you give not to accumulate, but to rebalance. Where you’re recognised and supported for what you contribute, openly. This doesn’t mean the end of value, it means the end of commodification as the only language for it. Capitalism made money sacred. The #4opens world breaks that spell.

1. Radical Reductions in Inequality

The current digital economy centralises control in the hands of the #nastyfew, the platform owners, the server landlords, the data hoarders. In contrast, a #4opens world puts common infrastructure – physical and digital – under democratic stewardship.

Open code, open governance, open data, open processes. These tools dismantle the gatekeeping logic of closed silos. We stop renting access to our own lives. We stop working to make the rich richer. What results is not just a redistribution of resources, but a recomposition of power. Rich and poor stop being natural categories. Inequality becomes a historical memory.

1. Ecological Transformation via Digital Abundance

In this world, we break the toxic loop where growth = consumption = progress. As digital goods expand – freely shareable, replicable, adaptable – the material basis of economic growth shrinks.

Instead of growth for its own sake, we focus on ecological outcomes. Energy systems localise. Circular economies flourish. The planet breathes again because we’ve stopped mistaking consumerism for culture. Post-consumption, we can meet human needs without destroying the biosphere.

1. Real Community, Not Algorithmic Spectacle

When your networks are open, knowable, and modifiable, you stop being a metric or a data point. You become a person in a community again. We build networks of care and trust. The #4opens give us tools to know each other better, to collaborate without permission, and to keep relationships alive across distance and time. We escape the isolation of the #dotcons by remembering what it means to belong, not to brands, but to people.

1. Reclaiming the Meaning of ‘Common Sense’

In this transition, we’ll have to rethink almost everything we take for granted. Why do we work so much? Why do we compete instead of collaborate? Why is everything a secret? Why are we trained to distrust?

The capitalist world naturalised its own ideology, it taught us that exploitation was just “how the world works.” The #4opens world undoes this conditioning. We’ll discover that our “common sense” was a prison. Open thinking makes new realities possible.

1. Privacy in the Age of the #Dotcons

We already lost privacy. Let’s be honest. The #dotcons and the surveillance state see everything. This isn’t a warning, it’s the present. There’s no going back to closed data. Not legally. Not technically. The dream of sealed-off privacy is gone. So what can we do?

We open the #metadata bag. All of it. We make the hidden flows of power visible. We stop pretending that corporate surveillance is okay while peer-to-peer transparency is dangerous.

Yes, it’s uncomfortable. But in a world where we’ve already been stripped naked by Google, Amazon, and the NSA, radical transparency becomes the preferd path to justice. The question isn’t “how do we hide?” but “how do we share wisely and govern openly?”

1. What Does a Post-Capitalist, Open Society Look Like?

It’s not utopia. It’s messy. It’s federated. It’s full of tension and debate. But it’s also a world where:

Decisions are made in the open, not behind closed doors.Software is built to be forked, not locked.Platforms are governed by people and communitys, not shareholders.Care is more valuable than control.Collaboration is default, not an afterthought.

This is the vision of the #4opens, not a theory, but a practice. A lived, everyday politics. A shift from passive consumption to active creation. It’s the beginning of something new, rooted in everything we already know works, if we just trust each other enough to try.

So, what does a #4opens world look like? It looks like the world we’re already building, underneath the rubble of the old one. Time to pick up your tools.