#Tag
The hard part is working with the empowered disempowered of our #fashionista class. Why good faith is a technical requirement for #FOSS https://hamishcampbell.com/why-good-faith-is-a-technical-requirement-for-foss/
The hard part is working with the empowered disempowered of our #fashionista class. Why good faith is a technical requirement for #FOSS https://hamishcampbell.com/why-good-faith-is-a-technical-requirement-for-foss/
Why good faith is a technical requirement for #FOSS
If you’ve spent years in #FOSS, you’ve likely developed a strong allergy to vague political language. You care about licenses, reproducibility, governance models, and whether something actually runs. Good. That discipline is why free software exists at all.
But here’s the uncomfortable question, what if the biggest blocker to the #openweb right now isn’t technical debt - but social debt? And what if “good faith” is not a moral nicety, but a core infrastructure requirement?
The […]
Why good faith is a technical requirement for #FOSS
If you’ve spent years in #FOSS, you’ve likely developed a strong allergy to vague political language. You care about licenses, reproducibility, governance models, and whether something actually runs. Good. That discipline is why free software exists at all.
But here’s the uncomfortable question, what if the biggest blocker to the #openweb right now isn’t technical debt - but social debt? And what if “good faith” is not a moral nicety, but a core infrastructure requirement?
The […]
This message is a spade
Ten years ago - and honestly long before that - there were endless conversations on #failbook about how useful it was for campaigning. The dominant view back then was simple: it’s just cat memes, it's just tooling, it isn’t political so we can use it harmlessly. Before Snowden, this wasn’t a fringe view - it was probably a 90% consensus, especially among activists, and #fashionista tech communities. I’m not pointing fingers here, as this was normal. Many of us - including friends and […]
Funding Proposal: Open Media Network (#OMN) – Building Portable, Human-Centred Digital Commons
https://nlnet.nl/fediversity
Project Title
Open Media Network (OMN): Portable Digital Commons for a Federated Europe
Summary
The Open Media Network (#OMN) is a real grassroots initiative to build sustainable, human-centred digital infrastructure aligned with the principles of the #openweb and the #4opens. To providing easy-to-use, hosted cloud services with service portability and freedom at their core - OMN focuses on creating living social ecosystems alongside technical […]
This message is a spade
Ten years ago - and honestly long before that - there were endless conversations on #failbook about how useful it was for campaigning. The dominant view back then was simple: it’s just cat memes, it's just tooling, it isn’t political so we can use it harmlessly. Before Snowden, this wasn’t a fringe view - it was probably a 90% consensus, especially among activists, and #fashionista tech communities. I’m not pointing fingers here, as this was normal. Many of us - including friends and […]
Funding Proposal: Open Media Network (#OMN) – Building Portable, Human-Centred Digital Commons
https://nlnet.nl/fediversity
Project Title
Open Media Network (OMN): Portable Digital Commons for a Federated Europe
Summary
The Open Media Network (#OMN) is a real grassroots initiative to build sustainable, human-centred digital infrastructure aligned with the principles of the #openweb and the #4opens. To providing easy-to-use, hosted cloud services with service portability and freedom at their core - OMN focuses on creating living social ecosystems alongside technical […]
The rise of #stupidindividualism as a mainstream path
Part of the shitty mess we’re in comes from the failure of #DIY culture and the rise of #stupidindividualism as the common sense path. #stupidindividualism is completely unscalable in social terms. It fragments, isolates, and exhausts. That isn’t accidental, it’s a classic divide-and-control strategy of the #deathcult. And we need to consciously step away, and away, and far away from this.
An example, over the last 20 years, I’ve answered the same questions individually, over and […]
The rise of #stupidindividualism as a mainstream path
Part of the shitty mess we’re in comes from the failure of #DIY culture and the rise of #stupidindividualism as the common sense path. #stupidindividualism is completely unscalable in social terms. It fragments, isolates, and exhausts. That isn’t accidental, it’s a classic divide-and-control strategy of the #deathcult. And we need to consciously step away, and away, and far away from this.
An example, over the last 20 years, I’ve answered the same questions individually, over and […]
We need to stop worshipping a #deathcult
A path to do this is to step away from the #mainstreming mess. In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. The prize recognised their work on how institutions shape prosperity, most famously through their book Why Nations Fail. The timing matters, it matters a lot.
This award lands at exactly the moment we should be asking why Institutional Economics - the respectable face of #mainstreaming - has spent the last fifteen years […]
We need to stop worshipping a #deathcult
A path to do this is to step away from the #mainstreming mess. In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. The prize recognised their work on how institutions shape prosperity, most famously through their book Why Nations Fail. The timing matters, it matters a lot.
This award lands at exactly the moment we should be asking why Institutional Economics - the respectable face of #mainstreaming - has spent the last fifteen years […]
#Fashionista #postmodern #blocking #spiky #fluffy - What is not real is pretending that violence is secondary to discomfort over language https://hamishcampbell.com/what-is-not-real-is-pretending-that-violence-is-secondary-to-discomfort-over-language/
#Fashionista #postmodern #blocking #spiky #fluffy - What is not real is pretending that violence is secondary to discomfort over language https://hamishcampbell.com/what-is-not-real-is-pretending-that-violence-is-secondary-to-discomfort-over-language/
The #openweb is a space for both progressives and reactionary groups
One uncomfortable thing we need to address, calmly and constructively, is this: for the last decade, the right has been better at cooperating around #openweb media than the left.
This isn’t because the right has better politics. It’s because they’ve been more pragmatic about infrastructure. While much of the left argued endlessly about identity, fashion, theory, tone, and purity, right-wing and reactionary groups quietly built linking ecosystems: shared blogs, cross-posting networks, […]
It’s pointless to build on complexity in a post-truth world powered by #techchurn and driven by #fashionista incentives. How fear blocks change https://hamishcampbell.com/the-fashionista-problem-how-fear-blocks-change/
The #OMN plan, is to keep working and presume people will stop being #mainstreaming prats at some point. The #Fashionista problem: How fear blocks change https://hamishcampbell.com/the-fashionista-problem-how-fear-blocks-change/
On the #openweb path, what “prat” means
On the #OMN and #openweb paths, when I talk about not being a “prat”, am not talking about a personal insult in the everyday sense, I am naming a pattern of behaviour that actively blocks collective work, let's be explicit. A prat is someone who:
They talk about problems endlessly but won’t touch the shovel. They judge seeds for not being trees. They dismiss unfinished work while contributing nothing usable themselves. This isn’t […]
On the #openweb path, what “prat” means
On the #OMN and #openweb paths, when I talk about not being a “prat”, am not talking about a personal insult in the everyday sense, I am naming a pattern of behaviour that actively blocks collective work, let's be explicit. A prat is someone who:
They talk about problems endlessly but won’t touch the shovel. They judge seeds for not being trees. They dismiss unfinished work while contributing nothing usable themselves. This isn’t […]
The #Fashionista problem: How fear blocks change
This story is about compost, not control: Our world is smeared in social shit. We live in a vast, stinking pile of it. The left has its post-modern shit - where truth dissolves into vibes and dreams. The right has its fascist shit - where truth is something you enforce with obedience and violence. We drink the seeping effluent from this dung heap. Our work, our shops, our politics, our tech... all of it is smeared in the same rot. The planet itself is decomposing under the weight of this […]
A fashionista culture addicted to surface can’t change
Most of what the #fashionista fights and campaigns for, and expends endless energy on isn’t liberation, it’s unthinking equality in worshipping the #deathcult. The argument isn’t about whether the path is destructive. That’s quietly accepted ignored, inevitable, “just how things are.” The fight is about who gets included on the path, who gets representation, who gets a seat at the table - not about whether the table should exist, or whether it’s crushing everyone underneath […]
What Did We Learn from Web3, Crypto?
Looking back from the mid-2020s, the arc of #web03, #NFTs, and blockchain culture is very clear. What once promised (lied about) decentralisation, liberation, and a break from corporate capture now looks like the same, mess, #techcurn pattern repeating itself, yes it had new language, new branding, but it was easy to see it had the same underlying mess making dynamics.
As these #geekproblem projects hollowed out, the signs became hard to ignore. The technical optimism faded, the user bases […]
