#dotcons — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #dotcons, aggregated by home.social.
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The Politics of Ignorance
One of the important ideas in the sociology of science is also one of the easiest to misunderstand: knowledge is socially produced. This does not mean that scientists simply make things up, it means something much more practical. Science is a human activity, it requires people, institutions, money, equipment, archives, universities, laboratories, communities and time. What we choose to investigate - and what we choose not to investigate - is therefore shaped by society. That means there is […] -
The language around #climatechaos is changing
For years, climate breakdown was treated as distant, a problem for activists, scientists, future generations or places somewhere else. That blinded view is now harder to sustain. Heat, fires, floods, crop failures, infrastructure disruption, rising insurance costs and the growing difficulty of simply keeping homes and communities safe are making climate disruption part of our everyday life. As we are talking about tech on this site - the important question for the #OMN is therefore not only […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-language-around-climatechaos-is-changing/
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Religion, mystery and the #openweb
I am not religious, but that does not mean religion is something that can only be dismissed as irrational, stupid or obsolete. There is a useful distinction between believing in a religion and understanding the social, cultural and philosophical work that religion has historically done. This matters for the #OMN because we are interested in how human beings make meaning, build communities and organise themselves when they don't have complete knowledge of the world. We don't know everything - […]https://hamishcampbell.com/religion-mystery-and-the-openweb/
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It’s truly a mess — but we do need anti-capitalist messaging, and it can be dressed in positive clothes.
I’m using the “negative” language to make space for something more positive. Sometimes you need to name the problem before you can move beyond it.
The hashtags make everyday life feel unpleasant, and that’s a small but needed step if we’re serious about challenging the #deathcult of neoliberalism, #stupidindividualism around identity politics and postmodernism, #dotcons for the tech industry’s con job around our communications, and #failbook for the mess we’ve made over the last 20 years..
Name the problem, make space for the alternative. Then build something better.
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OMN: Activity, culture and why Soviet experiments matter
One of the interesting things about the history of the #Fediverse is how many of its ideas come from places that, at first glance, seem completely unrelated to social media or network technology. #ActivityPub is a good example - the word activity carries a much older intellectual history, including the work of Soviet psychologist Alexei Leontiev, who developed what became known as activity theory. His work grew out of the cultural-historical psychology of Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria, and […]https://hamishcampbell.com/omn-activity-culture-and-why-soviet-experiments-matter/
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@info
The individual appears to have a choice, but the network determines the cost of exercising it. This is one of the fundamental problems with the current #dotcons as they don’t simply sell software to individuals, they capture networks. Network effects become political power – once enough people are locked inside a platform, the platform becomes difficult to leave. This is often described as a “network effect”, as though it were simply a technical feature, it isn’t, it is a abusive social relationship. -
The individual, is not, the starting point for the #OMN
One of the most useful ways to understand the mess we are in today is to ask a deceptively simple question - what comes first - the individual or the network? #Mainstreaming economics startes with the individual, were sociology, anthropology and related traditions start somewhere else - with relationships, institutions, communities and the social structures into which individuals are born. This difference matters enormously, when we start thinking about technology, politics, economics and […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-individual-is-not-the-starting-point-for-the-omn/
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Public conversation about public problems
Our current working models of “governance” in #opensource are mostly: Monarchy - the dictator for life.Aristocracy - the devs.Oligarchy - NGOs/funders.And way out on the edge: Democracy - the users. We need better governance native to the #openweb. Let's look at this at a more personal level before the normal wider social view. Yes, in #FOSS development the devs doing the work deserve respect, and #OMN isn't arguing that users should simply demand things from volunteers. The point […]https://hamishcampbell.com/public-conversation-about-public-problems/
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The #openweb needs diversity, not monoculture
The problems we face in the #openweb are often presented as technology problems. Which protocol, platform, licence, federation path, software? Which standard? These questions matter, but they are not the foundations of the problem. A lot of what we are seeing is really a cultural clash. Different parts of the alternative tech world have different ideas about what technology is for, who it should serve, how much control is acceptable, how open something needs to be, and how much compromise is […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-openweb-needs-diversity-not-monoculture/
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This summer #climatechaos
This summer, heat, fires, the soon to come winter floods and insurance withdrawals will make #climatechaos harder to treat as something happening somewhere else. For years, climate breakdown was framed as an activist issue, something discussed by environmental groups while mainstream politics carried on with business as usual. That is changing, people are experiencing the consequences: extreme heat, flooding, damaged homes, rising insurance costs, failing infrastructure and growing […]https://hamishcampbell.com/this-summer-climatechaos-is-mainstream/
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A little #fluffy reminder, when an #openweb projects gets flooded with conspiracy, dogma and endless prat fights, the grounded, constructive people drift away - sometimes straight back to the #dotcons.
Being independent doesn't mean believing everything. Being radical doesn't mean shutting down dialogue. Let's make spaces where people can think, disagree, learn and still build things together.
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The internet didn’t just accidentally become shit. The #OMN and the fight against the #dotcons https://hamishcampbell.com/the-omn-and-the-fight-against-the-dotcons/
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The #OMN and the fight against the #dotcons
The internet didn't just accidentally become shit. Yes, the #dotcons are responsible for plenty of it: surveillance, advertising, addictive algorithms, platform lock-in, spam, fake reviews and the endless extraction of human attention. But focusing on a few companies misses the bigger story, that the mess is the outcome of decades of wider #deathcult worshipping political and economic choices. Yes, we allowed enormous platforms to buy competitors, capture markets, privatise public […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-omn-and-the-fight-against-the-dotcons/
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20 years of #dotcons selling libertarian individualism has pushed aside the collective politics that once made the #openweb revolutionary.
For 20 years the #geekproblem helped turn "left tech" into the #closedweb. That's a disaster we can't keep repeating.
No prat fights, we need alternatives: #IndymediaBack, #OMN, #OGB, #MakingHistory. To rebuild collective power.
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Living through twenty years of #dotcons addiction
https://hamishcampbell.com/living-through-twenty-years-of-dotcons-addiction/
🫧 via https://bubbles.town/entry/44763090 -
Living through twenty years of #dotcons addiction
For those of us who've spent the last twenty years working around alternative technology, grassroots media and activism, the hardest thing to watch has been how deeply the #dotcons have become embedded in the culture. We know the problems, we've been talking about surveillance, extraction, algorithmic manipulation, platform lock-in and the destruction of community for years. And yet we keep going back, not because people are stupid, but because addiction is powerful - especially when the […]https://hamishcampbell.com/living-through-twenty-years-of-dotcons-addiction/
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The #OMN is a simple path with a radical aim: to shift power away from the #geekproblem and the #dotcons, and back to the people who actually create media and build communities.
From that grassroots digital commons, new social, economic and cultural ecosystems can grow. The tools redistribute power. What we do with that power is up to us.
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Media, the deathcult and climatechaos
The current wave of wildfires across Europe is not simply a natural disaster, it is also exposing a deeper mess, the failure of our information systems. Instead of explaining why Europe is burning, significant sections of the corporate media are either ignoring #climatechaos or distracting by blaming rewilding, net-zero policies and environmental protections. Rather than confronting the #KISS scientific evidence that fossil fuel combustion is driving global heating, they redirect public anger […]https://hamishcampbell.com/media-the-deathcult-and-climatechaos/
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The Fediverse is fun and growing, but it seems to kinda be on autopilot at the moment
Q, The #Fediverse seams to kinda be on autopilot at the moment - I miss the days when the community was more focused....A. I'd say it's growing and changing. From my window, there's a LOT happening. Many people are excited by the new stuff that's landing, while others are afraid of how those changes may rock the boat they're on. My solution is to build a bigger boat, because everyone needs the opportunity to be here. But that's understandably scary for those who want a very small, exclusive […] -
One of the problems in grassroots organising is trying to make a far-away place the focus of a community. It rarely works.
Community grows from shared experience, shared work and shared responsibility. These things are local, even when the network is global. If people are expected to invest their energy into an abstract centre somewhere else, they usually become passive consumers rather than active participants. This is the opposite of #DIY.
The #DIY path is that people build where they are. They create local groups, local media, local archives and local trust. They solve real problems together, then connect these local commons through the #openweb.
When a distant organisation, conference, website or institution becomes the centre of attention, people stop making things themselves. They wait for the centre to provide leadership, resources or permission. The result is predictable: the distant place becomes overloaded, bureaucratic and disconnected, while everywhere else becomes quiet and dependent.
The irony is that the centre itself often stays dull. It cannot generate the diversity, creativity and resilience that comes from many autonomous communities creating their own culture. It becomes a bottleneck rather than a catalyst.
This is one of the lessons from the history of #Indymedia and the wider #openweb. The strength was never in one global website. It came from hundreds of local collectives publishing their own stories, solving their own problems and sharing them across open networks. The network mattered because the local nodes were alive.
The same applies to #OMN.
The goal is not to build one place that everyone depends on. The goal is to help thousands of places become active, then connect them through open standards like #RSS and #ActivityPub. Federation is valuable because it allows communities to remain rooted where they are while participating in something much larger.
A healthy network is not built by pulling everyone towards a single centre. It is built by helping every node become a centre of its own.
That is the difference between a platform and a commons. The #dotcons centralise attention. The #openweb distributes it.
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The answer isn’t to run away, it’s to root ourselves somewhere that can’t be shut down. The #dotcons, #mainstreaming, and Build to Walk Away https://hamishcampbell.com/the-dotcons-mainstreaming-and-build-and-walk-away/
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How liberal media tries to “fix” liberal media
The current mess in media isn't that journalism has become biased, its always been, the problem is that the "progressive" #mainstreaming institutions trying to solve the crisis are still inside the assumptions that created it. Take the current liberal darling project Ground News, their promise is attractive: escape your filter bubble, compare left and right, become a more informed citizen. But notice the framing, the solution to broken media is… another layer of liberal media […]https://hamishcampbell.com/lets-look-at-how-liberal-media-tries-to-fix-liberal-media/
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The #Deathcult is a historical metaphor
History shows that societies can normalize destructive ideas until they become "common sense." The tragedy of the Irish Famine illustrates how blinded dogmatic thinking becomes more powerful than human need. Food existed, yet the prevailing political economy treated markets, property rights, and profit as more important than preventing mass suffering. The disaster was not simply natural; it was shaped by human choices and by the values those choices expressed. Today we face a different […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-deathcult-is-a-historical-metaphor/
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The mess, the Commons, and the Paths Out of Mess
https://hamishcampbell.com/the-deathcult-is-a-historical-metaphor/ We spend a lot of time talking about crises as if they're sudden events, they rarely are, crises are the outcome of decades of accumulated social, political, economic and technological choices. The challenge isn't simply understanding why societies enter periods of instability, it's understanding how they find their way back out again. History suggests something important - entering crisis is often easier than leaving it - […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-mess-the-commons-and-the-paths-out-of-mess/
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This isn't about telling people to stop having fun, it's about naming the #fashionistas - we keep using tools built by and for the paths we claim to oppose, then act surprised when the outcomes serve those platforms. Different outcomes need different tools and different process, not more polished mess on the same #dotcons feeds.
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The "why not both" answer sounds reasonable, but it dodges the issue - balance. When 95% of energy goes into #dotcons noise and 5% into actual #openweb infrastructure, we're not doing "both", we're feeding the #deathcult and calling it activism. Ridicule has its place, but ridicule alone changes nothing if there are no commons being built alongside it.
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The meme vs activism argument is the same #blocking - people mistaking the feeling of doing something for the doing of something. Sharing memes on #dotcons is easy, safe, and rewarded with dopamine. Building #openweb alternatives is boring, hard, and rewarded with almost nothing. That imbalance is not an accident, it's the business model that feeds the mess we are in.
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You might have noticed that last 20 years of #meme culture and #goingviral on the #dotcons have been distractions, keeping us engaged while pulling us deeper into the #deathcult.
Many of us spent the last decade feeding this system, often without realising where it would lead. #Brexit and #climatechaos are part of the wider consequences of that culture.
The important thing now isn't blame, it's changing direction. Step away from the algorithms. Help build the commons instead.
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The old #openweb wasn't destroyed by one thing, but by many. The #encryptionists security theatre, broken #UX and trustless relationships. The #geekproblem turned living communities into technical subcultures. The #fashionistas chased novelty, status and hype. The #dotcons enclosed our data and metadata for profit and social control.
Each played a part. The #Fediverse is a first step in rebooting the #openweb. But we need to stop copying old mistakes and grow "native" alternatives based on community, trust and the #4opens.
That's the path #OMN is building.