* The right-wing feeds on division.
* The left should grow from trust.
That sounds like #KISS because it is. But this simple truth is buried under decades of ideological shit: #Stalinism's dead weight, #Postmodernism's fog, #Neoliberalism's rot, and now the wider social, political and technological mess they have all helped leave behind.
We don't need to pretend this history didn't happen. We need to understand it,
then we need to compost it, turn the pile, let it breathe, pull apart the assumptions.
Keep what is useful, let the rotten parts decay, turn all that accumulated failure into something fertile.
Because the alternative to the right-wing politics of fear, division and permanent culture war is not just another set of slogans.
It is trust, not being nice to everyone. Trust is built through doing things together, being accountable, showing your working, admitting mistakes, sharing power and staying around long enough to learn from failure.
* That is why the #commons matters.
* That is why the #openweb matters.
And that is why the demand to “use the proper channels” is so often a trap.
* Who owns those channels?
* Who wrote the rules?
* Who staffs the committees?
* Who decides what counts as legitimate?
Too often the machinery of #mainstreaming is designed to absorb dissent without allowing dissent to change anything. You submit the form, attend the consultation, become a stakeholder, write the response, wait for the committee.
You get thanked for your valuable contribution and then nothing changes. The energy is drained away, and the existing power remains exactly where it was. This is not always a conspiracy. It doesn't need to be. Systems reproduce power simply because that is what they have been designed to do.
And this is what really scares the #fashionistas and #mainstreaming crew about grassroots alternatives: We don't need them. We can walk away, build our own infrastructure, our own media. We build trust through doing things together - that is the important bit.
The answer isn't to create another closed alternative controlled by another small group of experts. That would just be more of the same, the answer is open process, the #4opens.
This is where #OMN fits, not as another shiny platform competing for attention, but as part of a longer #openweb reboot: grassroots news, archiving and eventually governance built around federation, trust, participation and shared infrastructure.
We don't need to win their game, we need to stop playing it. Their machine runs on division, attention, status and extraction. Our alternative has to run on participation, trust, memory, care and shared power.
So yes, there is a huge pile of shit in front of us. Social shit, political shit, technological shit, institutional shit, funding shit and #techshit.
We don't deny the pile, we pick up the shovel,
we turn it over, we compost it. And we use whatever fertile ground comes out of it to grow something living.
That's the work, together.
#OMN #KISS #4opens #openweb #commons #deathcult #mainstreaming #fashionistas #techshit
