#dotcons — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #dotcons, aggregated by home.social.
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The exhaustion of thinking out loud, why engagement matters
The pattern we need to compost - You write something rooted in years of experience and practical work, you try to make it accessible. Someone responds immediately with an objection that shows they haven’t read let alone followed the argument yet. Or they react to the tone, the hashtag, or one phrase instead of engaging with the substance. Sometimes the response is sincere but rushed, sometimes it’s performative, often it’s shaped by the habits we’ve absorbed from #dotcons culture, […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-exhaustion-of-thinking-out-loud-and-why-engagement-matters/
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The exhaustion of thinking out loud, why engagement matters
The pattern we need to compost - You write something rooted in years of experience and practical work, you try to make it accessible. Someone responds immediately with an objection that shows they haven’t read let alone followed the argument yet. Or they react to the tone, the hashtag, or one phrase instead of engaging with the substance. Sometimes the response is sincere but rushed, sometimes it’s performative, often it’s shaped by the habits we’ve absorbed from #dotcons culture, […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-exhaustion-of-thinking-out-loud-and-why-engagement-matters/
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The exhaustion of thinking out loud, why engagement matters
The pattern we need to compost - You write something rooted in years of experience and practical work, you try to make it accessible. Someone responds immediately with an objection that shows they haven’t read let alone followed the argument yet. Or they react to the tone, the hashtag, or one phrase instead of engaging with the substance. Sometimes the response is sincere but rushed, sometimes it’s performative, often it’s shaped by the habits we’ve absorbed from #dotcons culture, […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-exhaustion-of-thinking-out-loud-and-why-engagement-matters/
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The exhaustion of thinking out loud, why engagement matters
The pattern we need to compost - You write something rooted in years of experience and practical work, you try to make it accessible. Someone responds immediately with an objection that shows they haven’t read let alone followed the argument yet. Or they react to the tone, the hashtag, or one phrase instead of engaging with the substance. Sometimes the response is sincere but rushed, sometimes it’s performative, often it’s shaped by the habits we’ve absorbed from #dotcons culture, […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-exhaustion-of-thinking-out-loud-and-why-engagement-matters/
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The exhaustion of thinking out loud, why engagement matters
The pattern we need to compost - You write something rooted in years of experience and practical work, you try to make it accessible. Someone responds immediately with an objection that shows they haven’t read let alone followed the argument yet. Or they react to the tone, the hashtag, or one phrase instead of engaging with the substance. Sometimes the response is sincere but rushed, sometimes it’s performative, often it’s shaped by the habits we’ve absorbed from #dotcons culture, […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-exhaustion-of-thinking-out-loud-and-why-engagement-matters/
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Composting the mess of digital security in activism – We need to talk about this, offline
The online tools we "common sense" rely on for organising and campaigning are genuinely dangerous, and I find that paralysing. This isn't paranoia, it's a practical reality that urgently needs addressing. Until we do, offline working groups are one of the few reliable ways to unblock the mess. Where we actually are now... Disappearing, encrypted chat outside the #dotcons is one of the few spaces that feels even marginally safe. But even then, safety depends entirely on who's in the room, […] -
People ask why the articles are hard to follow without background, it’s a fair point
People ask why the articles are hard to follow without background, it's a fair point, but a distraction as these are not stand-alone hot takes, they are all a part of a long flowing story about how we got into this mess and how we might get out of it. So, focus, please share this and the other posts if we’re going to recover focus and direction on the #openweb path. What happened over the last ten years on the Fediverse wasn’t random. It was a slow drift away from the native path that […] -
People ask why the articles are hard to follow without background, it’s a fair point
Please share this and the other posts if we’re going to recover focus and direction on the #openweb path. What happened over the last ten years on the Fediverse wasn’t random. It was a slow drift away from the native path that worked, and toward a confused mess of branding, #NGO careerism, platform thinking, and endless social noise. https://hamishcampbell.com/what-happened-over-the-last-ten-years-on-our-fediverse-path/ People ask why the articles are hard to follow without background, […] -
A fluff view of current tech we need to compost
You know, when people are heading over a cliff, I'm more than happy to be "left behind". This story is #openwashing, not innovation. “New European social network” is actually a fork of #Bluesky wrapped in sovereignty language, as Elena Rossini says with the same #dotcons logic - PR-first launch (Davos), reality comes later (or never). This tech mess illustrates, if people start with branding, funding, and media narrative instead of community and process, it’s not #openweb - it’s […]https://hamishcampbell.com/a-fluff-view-of-current-tech-we-need-to-compost/
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A fluff view of current tech we need to compost
You know, when people are heading over a cliff, I'm more than happy to be "left behind". This story is #openwashing, not innovation. “New European social network” is actually a fork of #Bluesky wrapped in sovereignty language, as Elena Rossini says with the same #dotcons logic - PR-first launch (Davos), reality comes later (or never). This tech mess illustrates is if people start with branding, funding, and media narrative instead of community and process, it’s not #openweb - it’s […]https://hamishcampbell.com/a-fluff-view-of-current-tech-we-need-to-compost/
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A fluff view of current tech we need to compost
This story is #openwashing, not innovation. “New European social network” → actually a fork of #Bluesky wrapped in sovereignty language, with the same #dotcons logic. PR-first launch (Davos), reality comes later (or never). What this tech mess illustrates is if people start with branding, funding, and media narrative instead of community and process, it’s not #openweb - it’s #closedweb in a mask, ignoring existing commons is an easy to see the red flag. Why is this a mess? […]https://hamishcampbell.com/a-fluff-view-of-current-tech-we-need-to-compost/
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A fluff view of current tech we need to compost
This story is #openwashing, not innovation. “New European social network” → actually a fork of #Bluesky wrapped in sovereignty language, with the same #dotcons logic. PR-first launch (Davos), reality comes later (or never). What this tech mess illustrates is if people start with branding, funding, and media narrative instead of community and process, it’s not #openweb - it’s #closedweb in a mask, ignoring existing commons is an easy to see the red flag. Why is this a mess? […]https://hamishcampbell.com/a-fluff-view-of-current-tech-we-need-to-compost/
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A fluff view of current tech we need to compost
You know, when people are heading over a cliff, I'm more than happy to be "left behind". This story is #openwashing, not innovation. “New European social network” is actually a fork of #Bluesky wrapped in sovereignty language, as Elena Rossini says with the same #dotcons logic - PR-first launch (Davos), reality comes later (or never). This tech mess illustrates, if people start with branding, funding, and media narrative instead of community and process, it’s not #openweb - it’s […]https://hamishcampbell.com/a-fluff-view-of-current-tech-we-need-to-compost/
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People resist visible structure
Freedoms are not given, they are taken.-- Peter Kropotkin This post comes from real life experience with #Oxfordboaters, but I am going to address it as a tech problem as it is the same mess we need to work on composting in our social tech projects. People don’t actually hate structure, what they tend to resist is visible structure - the kind we need to make visible so we can see, question, and challenge. At the same time, they’re always perfectly comfortable inside invisible structures […]https://hamishcampbell.com/people-resist-is-visible-structure/
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The #OMN is a path to growing an alternative to corporate-controlled platforms (#dotcons), a “public-first” digital commons. Composting the #encryptionist detour https://hamishcampbell.com/the-encryptionist-detour/
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The #encryptionist detour
Let’s look back to before the #Fediverse, to be honest about the last two decades of #openweb failure, for a long time we got pulled off the path. Not only by enemies, but by a mix of fear, fashion, and half-understood technical “solutions” that felt right to fearful people at the time. The rise of the dogmatic, blinded #encryptionist mindset came out of real conditions of mass surveillance revelations (Snowden era), common sense #neoliberal distrust of states and corporations and the […] -
The Meta-Mess of the “Open” Social Web
Signal, Noise, and the missing ground - We have a signal-to-noise problem, that if we’re serious about “paths to growth,” we need to be honest about the paths and people pushing us down paths we’re actually walking. The problem was never just the #dotcons platforms. It’s what we build instead - and more importantly, how and why we build it. Right now, too much of the #openweb conversation is caught in narrative loops of reframing stagnation as growth, critique as progress and […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-meta-mess-of-the-open-social-web/
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The Problem Was Never Just the Platforms – It’s What We Build Instead
For years, the #fashionista #openweb conversation has been stuck in a loop of naming villains: surveillance capitalism, the #dotcons, Zuckerberg, Musk, “the algorithm.” But focusing on enemies only gets you so far. The creative question isn’t what we’re against - it’s what we’re actually building together to replace it. That’s where the #OMN takes a useful path. Yes, the big platforms absorb resistance, repackage it, and sell it back to us, that cycle is real. But pointing it […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-problem-was-never-just-the-platforms-its-what-we-build-instead/
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The for-profit platforms, underpinned by neoliberal ideology, drives much of the dysfunction we see - both in society and within tech itself. Life “inside the #dotcons” means participating, often uncritically, in reinforcing #stupidindividualism. Moving beyond this requires building alternatives grounded in the #4opens: open data, open source, open standards, and open processes. Projects like #OMN point in this direction.
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Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN
Activism has a reputation problem, in default #mainstreaming storytelling it’s painted as chaos, absence, or naive idealism. But if you look at what activists at best actually do, a different picture emerges: a long tradition of people working out, in practice, how to solve real problems together without relying on distant authority. And that’s the bit most people quietly skip. In most social/political movements, the hard questions - how we organise, decide, share resources, resolve […]https://hamishcampbell.com/actually-solving-things-and-why-this-matters-for-omn/
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Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN
Activism has a reputation problem, in default #mainstreaming storytelling it’s painted as chaos, absence, or naive idealism. But if you look at what activists at best actually do, a different picture emerges: a long tradition of people working out, in practice, how to solve real problems together without relying on distant authority. And that’s the bit most people quietly skip. In most social/political movements, the hard questions - how we organise, decide, share resources, resolve […]https://hamishcampbell.com/actually-solving-things-and-why-this-matters-for-omn/
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Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN
Activism has a reputation problem, in default #mainstreaming storytelling it’s painted as chaos, absence, or naive idealism. But if you look at what activists at best actually do, a different picture emerges: a long tradition of people working out, in practice, how to solve real problems together without relying on distant authority. And that’s the bit most people quietly skip. In most social/political movements, the hard questions - how we organise, decide, share resources, resolve […]https://hamishcampbell.com/actually-solving-things-and-why-this-matters-for-omn/
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Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN
Activism has a reputation problem, in default #mainstreaming storytelling it’s painted as chaos, absence, or naive idealism. But if you look at what activists at best actually do, a different picture emerges: a long tradition of people working out, in practice, how to solve real problems together without relying on distant authority. And that’s the bit most blinded people quietly skip. In most social/political movements, the hard questions - how we organise, decide, share resources, […]https://hamishcampbell.com/actually-solving-things-and-why-this-matters-for-omn/
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Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN
Activism has a reputation problem, in default #mainstreaming storytelling it’s painted as chaos, absence, or naive idealism. But if you look at what activists at best actually do, a different picture emerges: a long tradition of people working out, in practice, how to solve real problems together without relying on distant authority. And that’s the bit most people quietly skip. In most social/political movements, the hard questions - how we organise, decide, share resources, resolve […]https://hamishcampbell.com/actually-solving-things-and-why-this-matters-for-omn/
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#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)
#techchurn is the endless cycle of adopting new platforms, tools, and technologies - not because they solve any real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. It burns community trust, institutional memory, and activist energy, while leaving the underlying #nastyfew power structures untouched.https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=techchurn The #OMN uses #stupidindividualism to describe the culturally manufactured habit of prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective […]https://hamishcampbell.com/omn-grounding-the-roots-as-a-story/
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#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)
#techchurn is the endless cycle of adopting new platforms, tools, and technologies - not because they solve any real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. It burns community trust, institutional memory, and activist energy, while leaving the underlying #nastyfew power structures untouched.https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=techchurn The #OMN uses #stupidindividualism to describe the culturally manufactured habit of prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective […]https://hamishcampbell.com/omn-grounding-the-roots-as-a-story/
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#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)
#techchurn is the endless cycle of adopting new platforms, tools, and technologies - not because they solve any real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. It burns community trust, institutional memory, and activist energy, while leaving the underlying #nastyfew power structures untouched.https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=techchurn The #OMN uses #stupidindividualism to describe the culturally manufactured habit of prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective […]https://hamishcampbell.com/omn-grounding-the-roots-as-a-story/
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In the #OMN hashtag story, #UX (User Experience) isn't about making interfaces prettier or more intuitive - it's a political question about who technology is actually built for, where bad #UX is a symptom of the #geekproblem and the #dotcons optimising for engagement and control rather than real human need.
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In #OMN thinking, #traditionalmedia refers to the legacy thinking of broadcast and print institutions - TV, radio, newspapers - that present themselves as neutral but are structurally embedded in the same #neoliberal, #dotcons power systems they claim to objectively report on, making them megaphones for the #deathcult status quo rather than public interest journalism.
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#reboot is the necessary reset of the #openweb - stepping away from the dead ends of #techshit and #dotcons to rebuild digital infrastructure on human-centred, trust-based foundations, using tools like #activitypub and the #fediverse, guided by the #4opens.
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#OMN (Open Media Network) is a grassroots project to build human-centred, trust-based digital infrastructure on the #openweb - putting community need and collective governance ahead of technical complexity, commercial interest, and the centralised control of the #dotcons. It treats technology as a tool for social change rather than an end in itself, grounded in the #4opens (open code, open data, open standards, open process) and the principle that networks should be controlled and shaped by the people who use them.
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People, Process, and the Myth of Difficulty
What we are doing at #Oxfordboaters is simple, that’s the uncomfortable truth for people who see this as to complex. The core idea - people coming together around shared concerns, communicating openly, and acting collectively - is about as old as human society. There’s nothing technically complex about it, nothing conceptually obscure. Yet in practice, it feels almost impossible. So where does this friction come from? It’s not the goal, it’s not even the surface the process, most of […]https://hamishcampbell.com/people-process-and-the-myth-of-difficulty/
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People, Process, and the Myth of Difficulty
What we are doing at #Oxfordboaters is simple, that’s the uncomfortable truth for people who see this as to complex. The core idea - people coming together around shared concerns, communicating openly, and acting collectively - is about as old as human society. There’s nothing technically complex about it, nothing conceptually obscure. Yet in practice, it feels almost impossible. So where does this friction come from? It’s not the goal, it’s not even the surface the process, most of […]https://hamishcampbell.com/people-process-and-the-myth-of-difficulty/
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People, Process, and the Myth of Difficulty
What we are doing at #Oxfordboaters is simple, that’s the uncomfortable truth for people who see this as to complex. The core idea - people coming together around shared concerns, communicating openly, and acting collectively - is about as old as human society. There’s nothing technically complex about it, nothing conceptually obscure. Yet in practice, it feels almost impossible. So where does this friction come from? It’s not the goal, it’s not even the surface the process, most of […]https://hamishcampbell.com/people-process-and-the-myth-of-difficulty/
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People, Process, and the Myth of Difficulty
What we are doing at #Oxfordboaters is simple, that’s the uncomfortable truth for people who see this as to complex. The core idea - people coming together around shared concerns, communicating openly, and acting collectively - is about as old as human society. There’s nothing technically complex about it, nothing conceptually obscure. Yet in practice, it feels almost impossible. So where does this friction come from? It’s not the goal, it’s not even the surface the process, most of […]https://hamishcampbell.com/people-process-and-the-myth-of-difficulty/
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People, Process, and the Myth of Difficulty
What we are doing at #Oxfordboaters is simple, that’s the uncomfortable truth for people who see this as to complex. The core idea - people coming together around shared concerns, communicating openly, and acting collectively - is about as old as human society. There’s nothing technically complex about it, nothing conceptually obscure. Yet in practice, it feels almost impossible. So where does this friction come from? It’s not the goal, it’s not even the surface the process, most of […]https://hamishcampbell.com/people-process-and-the-myth-of-difficulty/
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The #dotcons, #mainstreaming, and Build to Walk Away
Three years ago I was trying to explain something simple in language liberals might actually hear. They talk about “platform capitalism.” Fine. But I’ve been calling it the #dotcons for 20 years - because that’s what it is - a con. The last 30 years of tech hasn’t just drifted into this mess. It’s been shaped, step by step, enclosure by enclosure, into systems designed to extract value from us. What we now call the internet is, in large part, a machine built to manipulate, […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-dotcons-mainstreaming-and-build-and-walk-away/
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So how do we mediate this fear?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcm-tOGiva0 Who would have though this would sum up our needed path for the #Oxfordboaters and the #fedivers? You would have to be an #asshole to unthinkingly disagree with what we are doing and pretty wise to thinkingly disagree with the path. Which one are you? So why are we in such a mess? Because people are acting from fear. Not always consciously, not always honestly - but fear is the driver. Fear of losing control. Fear of losing status. Fear of […] -
So how do we mediate this fear?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcm-tOGiva0 Who would have though this would sum up our needed path for the #Oxfordboaters and the #fedivers? You would have to be an #asshole to unthinkingly disagree with what we are doing and pretty wise to thinkingly disagree with the path. Which one are you? So why are we in such a mess? Because people are acting from fear. Not always consciously, not always honestly - but fear is the driver. Fear of losing control. Fear of losing status. Fear of […] -
So how do we mediate this fear?
You would have to be an #asshole to unthinkingly disagree with what we are doing and pretty wise to thinkingly disagree with the path. Which one are you? So why are we in such a mess? Because people are acting from fear. Not always consciously, not always honestly - but fear is the driver. Fear of losing control. Fear of losing status. Fear of uncertainty. Fear of each other. And when fear leads, people grasp for control. They close things down, centralise, gatekeep, and default to the […] -
So how do we mediate this fear?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcm-tOGiva0 Who would have though this would sum up our needed path for the Oxford boaters and the fedivers? You would have to be an #asshole to unthinkingly disagree with what we are doing and pretty wise to thinkingly disagree with the path. Which one are you? So why are we in such a mess? Because people are acting from fear. Not always consciously, not always honestly - but fear is the driver. Fear of losing control. Fear of losing status. Fear of […] -
So how do we mediate this fear?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcm-tOGiva0 Who would have though this would sum up our needed path for the #Oxfordboaters and the #fedivers? You would have to be an #asshole to unthinkingly disagree with what we are doing and pretty wise to thinkingly disagree with the path. Which one are you? So why are we in such a mess? Because people are acting from fear. Not always consciously, not always honestly - but fear is the driver. Fear of losing control. Fear of losing status. Fear of […] -
Do you remember when technology felt like a way forward?
Do you remember when tech felt like a way forward? That moment’s gone on the mainstream #closedweb path. What we’ve got now is something else entirely. Tools like Palantir and Project Maven aren’t about truth or insight. They’re excuse generators. Power does what it wants, then points to “the data” as cover. That’s the product. And the people building this? Still cosplaying as the good guys, well-paid servants of the #nastyfew, wrapped in the fading myth of being “freedom […]https://hamishcampbell.com/do-you-remember-when-technology-felt-like-a-way-forward/
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Do you remember when technology felt like a way forward?
Do you remember when tech felt like a way forward? That moment’s gone on the mainstream #closedweb path. What we’ve got now is something else entirely. Tools like Palantir and Project Maven aren’t about truth or insight. They’re excuse generators. Power does what it wants, then points to “the data” as cover. That’s the product. And the people building this? Still cosplaying as the good guys, well-paid servants of the #nastyfew, wrapped in the fading myth of being “freedom […]https://hamishcampbell.com/do-you-remember-when-technology-felt-like-a-way-forward/
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Do you remember when technology felt like a way forward?
Do you remember when tech felt like a way forward? That moment’s gone on the mainstream #closedweb path. What we’ve got now is something else entirely. Tools like Palantir and Project Maven aren’t about truth or insight. They’re excuse generators. Power does what it wants, then points to “the data” as cover. That’s the product. And the people building this? Still cosplaying as the good guys, well-paid servants of the #nastyfew, wrapped in the fading myth of being “freedom […]https://hamishcampbell.com/do-you-remember-when-technology-felt-like-a-way-forward/
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Do you remember when technology felt like a way forward?
Do you remember when tech felt like a way forward? That moment’s gone on the mainstream #closedweb path. What we’ve got now is something else entirely. Tools like Palantir and Project Maven aren’t about truth or insight. They’re excuse generators. Power does what it wants, then points to “the data” as cover. That’s the product. And the people building this? Still cosplaying as the good guys, well-paid servants of the #nastyfew, wrapped in the fading myth of being “freedom […]https://hamishcampbell.com/do-you-remember-when-technology-felt-like-a-way-forward/
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Do you remember when technology felt like a way forward?
Do you remember when tech felt like a way forward? That moment’s gone on the mainstream #closedweb path. What we’ve got now is something else entirely. Tools like Palantir and Project Maven aren’t about truth or insight. They’re excuse generators. Power does what it wants, then points to “the data” as cover. That’s the product. And the people building this? Still cosplaying as the good guys, well-paid servants of the #nastyfew, wrapped in the fading myth of being “freedom […]https://hamishcampbell.com/do-you-remember-when-technology-felt-like-a-way-forward/
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Rebuilding Journalism as Commons (not a product)
https://hamishcampbell.com/news-culture-on-the-fediverse/ It should be obvious that we need a path back to good journalism - journalism that sheds light on facts, connects the dots, and lets people trace those dots back to sources. This is what allows us to share, question, and discuss within our own trusted communities, and then spread that knowledge outward through federation, always linking back to the source. Right now, the #mainstreaming path is broken. It’s sometimes hard for people […]https://hamishcampbell.com/rebuilding-journalism-as-commons-not-a-product/
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Growing the #openweb – Notes for Composting the #dotcons (and growing an #OMN)
Today there are a lot of dishonest people - it’s become the default. Finding someone who is actually truthful is rare. So with this in mind, let’s stop being polite about this, what we’re living inside online right now isn’t “social media.” It’s a managed enclosure - a system designed to extract value, shape behaviour, and concentrate power. It's what I have been saying for the last 20 years. Call it what it is - digital #feudalism - The Lords, the Serfs, and the Server. When […]