⁂ Article

Pick up a shovel, the work is ours

The right-wing feeds on division.The left-wing grows from trust.

This simple #KISS truth is buried under decades of shit.

Stalinism’s dead weight.Postmodernism’s cynical fog.Neoliberalism’s greed-choked rot.All piled onto our social soil.

Now we stand in the stink:social, technological, political, philosophical mess.

We don’t deny it.We compost it.We turn the pile, let it breathe,make decay into fertile ground.

From this soil, we grow a humane culture.Trust. Commons. Care.A path […]

⁂ Article

Pick up a shovel, the work is ours

The right-wing feeds on division.The left-wing grows from trust.

This simple #KISS truth is buried under decades of shit.

Stalinism’s dead weight.Postmodernism’s cynical fog.Neoliberalism’s greed-choked rot.All piled onto our social soil.

Now we stand in the stink:social, technological, political, philosophical mess.

We don’t deny it.We compost it.We turn the pile, let it breathe,make decay into fertile ground.

From this soil, we grow a humane culture.Trust. Commons. Care.A path […]

⁂ Article

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 […]

⁂ Article

The OMN with indymediaback and makeinghistory are paths

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 […]

⁂ Article

Who are the #nastyfew?

They are the people who always rise to the top when #mainstreaming takes hold. You see them on TV, in parliament, running #NGOs, managing #dotcons tech projects.

On the surface, they don’t always look bad – in fact, they often present as competent, articulate, even charming. But scratch that surface and the pattern is clear: their drive is not shared flourishing, it’s possession and control.

This minority #nastyfew, from a historical view, today’s bourgeoisie. As Marx outlined […]

⁂ Article

Who are the #nastyfew?

They are the people who always rise to the top when #mainstreaming takes hold. You see them on TV, in parliament, running #NGOs, managing #dotcons tech projects.

On the surface, they don’t always look bad – in fact, they often present as competent, articulate, even charming. But scratch that surface and the pattern is clear: their drive is not shared flourishing, it’s possession and control.

This minority #nastyfew, from a historical view, today’s bourgeoisie. As Marx outlined […]

⁂ Article

Compost the blocking, keep the seeds alive, and make space for growth

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”. […]

@elena @oblomov

It's good to see people focusing on the #openweb, we have had a signal-to-noise issue from our #fashionistas for the last 5 years of the reboot, its pastime to focuses on issues internally and externally. As we have more direct power over internal mess than we do over the external #dotcons I am focusing activism on composting the internal #blockinghttps://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost yep, we need to balance this with pushing back the #dotcons and there #closedweb "common sense". We have piles of #techshit to compost...

⁂ Article

Compost the blocking, keep the seeds alive, and make space for growth

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”. […]

@elena @oblomov

It's good to see people focusing on the #openweb, we have had a signal-to-noise issue from our #fashionistas for the last 5 years of the reboot, its pastime to focuses on issues internally and externally. As we have more direct power over internal mess than we do over the external #dotcons I am focusing activism on composting the internal #blockinghttps://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost yep, we need to balance this with pushing back the #dotcons and there #closedweb "common sense". We have piles of #techshit to compost...

⁂ Article

Why “teach everyone to code” has become a dead-end slogan

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. […]

⁂ Article

Why “teach everyone to code” has become a dead-end slogan

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. […]

@hamishcampbell

imagine social media where nobody could read/write? it wouldnt even exist, but if it did, it would be only for the elite of literate people doing social media on behalf of everyone ....just like programming, including robots and drones and AI and ever more ubiquitious technologies are all programmed by an elite on behalf of us.

The only way is to pave ways to include more and more people into the field that defines how the world works in the same way that reading/writing did.

@serapath the whole thing about social change by training programming is in theory a path, but it's a failed path for the last 20 years, and it's had amply funding and resources pushed at it so we have plenty of illustration of this fail.

This is another example of the blinded #geekproblem

I use the word blinded to illustrate that people can't see the sense in front of their faces #KISS

And I use the hashtag #blocking to show the outcome of this blindness #KISS

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=blocking

The #KISS#OMN path is about building practical, commons-based media tools now, not later. Most of the mess - and the endless #blocking - comes from ownership and control. We sidestep that by placing a whole class of media firmly in the commons under the #4opens. This doesn’t “fix” the #mainstreaming mess overnight, but it gives us space to work before it catches up. By then, if we’ve done it right, society will have shifted toward a more open path.

This isn’t theory. If you’ve got resources, fund development. If you’re technical, code the apps and servers. If you understand UX, design for accessibility. If you do media, tell the story. The projects in the stories - from Oxford: Going with the Flow to Stalls and Code - are grounded in practical use and designed to mediate social breakdown for better outcomes. But they only work if we build them and use them in time. So let’s keep it positive, simple, and moving forward.

The #KISS#OMN path is about building practical, commons-based media tools now, not later. Most of the mess - and the endless #blocking - comes from ownership and control. We sidestep that by placing a whole class of media firmly in the commons under the #4opens. This doesn’t “fix” the #mainstreaming mess overnight, but it gives us space to work before it catches up. By then, if we’ve done it right, society will have shifted toward a more open path.

This isn’t theory. If you’ve got resources, fund development. If you’re technical, code the apps and servers. If you understand UX, design for accessibility. If you do media, tell the story. The projects in the stories - from Oxford: Going with the Flow to Stalls and Code - are grounded in practical use and designed to mediate social breakdown for better outcomes. But they only work if we build them and use them in time. So let’s keep it positive, simple, and moving forward.

@hamishcampbell

...but then again, thats something that is unlilely to happen, because fediverse ppl follow their own ideas. ...but we'll definitly get there.

First it woupd be cool to have a fully functional p2p-news-app with proper UI/UX ...and then maybe a bit of testing and then maybe integration with fediverse and if anyone likes the p2p experience, maybe they can even help lobby for funding, because it is tpugh to endlessly push this forward without any support

@serapath most of the mess and #blocking is based on ownership and control. We simply walk away from this mess by putting a class of media into the commons with the #4opens

And yes you would be right this #mainstreamin mess will fallow us eventually but by the time it catches up we might have changed society a bit to have a different path as outcome #KISS

https://hamishcampbell.com/the-omn-with-indymediaback-and-makeinghistory-are-paths/

⁂ Article

The OMN with indymediaback and makeinghistory are paths

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 […]

⁂ Article

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 […]