#mainstreaming narrows the field of imagination and excludes non-conforming ideas that could offer real solutions to systemic crises. Mainstreaming smooths the rough edges of society. It normalizes hierarchy, filters dissent, and packages politics into manageable narratives. It’s how radical demands are turned into reforms, then paperwork, then slogans, then forgotten.

Absorbing opposition into bureaucracy (e.g., NGOs, consultancy)

Rewarding compromise and incrementalism

Silencing or […]

We live in a time of crisis. Climate, community, communication, all are breaking down. Our tools and platforms no longer serve us. To make sense of this, we need to tell stories. And in the digital world, hashtags are one of the most powerful ways we do this. But our hashtags don’t just tag, they trace the roots of our problems, and signpost paths out. Each one is a seed. Together, they are a map.#dotcons – From #openweb to walled gardens. Once, the internet was a place of openness, […]

Hopelessness is a deeply conservative reaction to social change/challenge. Sarcasm and “meme” culture can be conservative with its strong focus on reaction, in this pushing reactionary/conservative rather than hope/progression. In a globalising world, strong “inward” looking tribalism is about conforming a narrow “consumerist” change/challenge to individuals with NO power for wider social outlooks. In the era of #climatechaos all of these dominant “invisible” movements are […]

The current ecosystem of alternative and grassroots media is too narrow in its imagination of what media could, and should, be. There’s a persistent naivety or, in some cases, a self-serving dishonesty. Many of the most “successful” progressive media groups continue to mimic #traditionalmedia without understanding, or addressing, the fact that they do not control their distribution. In effect, they’re renting space in someone else’s empire.

This is not just a mistake. It’s the […]

In the face of mounting crisis – social breakdown, political polarization, ecological collapse – many people turn inward. And in this turn, they mistake passivity, irony and detachment for resistance. But hopelessness is not radical, it’s deeply conservative. It says: “Nothing can change.” “Everything is corrupt.” “Why bother?”

This isn’t rebellion, it’s surrender. And it’s the exact emotional state that power systems – what we call the #deathcult of neoliberalism – […]

At its core, #mainstreaming is how we, often unconsciously, uphold and reproduce the values of the dominant system. In our time, that system is #neoliberalism, or what I metaphorically call the #deathcult. It’s the air we breathe: shaping our politics, our economics, even the food we eat and how we relate to each other.

In activist terms, #mainstreaming too often means pushing this dominant worldview into alternative spaces, building careers and institutions that play progressive on the […]

The hashtag story on this site is a way of using different hashtags to paint a picture of the current state of the world and the paths that can be taken to address the issues at hand. It involves defining each hashtag and how it relates to the larger narrative. Here is an example of a hashtag story:

#fashernista is about consumer capitalism and the negative impact it has on society, treating it as a social illness.

#dotcons are feeding this social illness by promoting constant consumption […]

An example of the #geekproblem is the refusal, or failure, to engage seriously with standards. In tech, as in life, nothing exists in isolation. Every app, every protocol, every line of code rests on a foundation of inherited agreements: protocols, languages, schemas, and governance systems. These are the invisible scaffolding of the digital world, we call them standards, and whether people like it or not, everything you’re building is already part of an industrial web of standards.

Now, […]

The old flower beds of #Indymedia lie fallow, not dead. The seeds are still there, beneath layers of neglect, factionalism, and the noise of 20 years of failed “alternatives.” What we need now is not revolution or reinvention, but revival. A slow, careful re-rooting in the fertile ground of experience.

We don’t need to tear it down or rebuild from scratch. Almost all of what worked between 2000–2008 still works today, at least 90% of the original social structure is sound. Let’s […]