In our media and tech projects, we’re walking two very different paths – often without any or partly realising the tension between them. On one side, we’re seceding under capitalism. That means navigating funding applications, #NGO partnerships, grant cycles, and institutional compromises. It’s where projects get trimmed down to what’s legible to funders. It’s survival, maybe even minor success, inside the system.

On the other side, we’re seceding toward the change we want and need. Building alternatives with radical trust, open governance, mutual aid, and grounded peer-to-peer systems. It’s messy, difficult. But it’s actually outside the system, what we used to call prefigurative politics, what we now build as #openweb infrastructure, federated networks, and horizontal institutions.

These two paths are not the same. And if we pretend they are, we lose. What we need is a #4opens bridge between them:

Open data to keep control in the commons.Open source to prevent black boxes of power.Open process so anyone can inspect and challenge decisions.Open standards to build actual interoperability - not walled gardens in disguise.

But here’s the problem we are currently blind to – that bridge doesn’t stay up on its own. It has to be maintained through deliberate political will, through active resistance to co-option, through remembering why we started building in the first place.

The mainstream will always try to absorb the open, turn it into a sandbox, a product, a brand. That’s the nature of #mainstreaming and #NGO logic. We’ve seen it again and again – #FOSS, #indymedia, #activism – all turned into funding pipelines and branding opportunities if not defended.

So our task is not just technical, it’s political infrastructure work to hold the bridge. Guard the open paths, so that we can compost what’s broken. And always build forward.