#nastyfew — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #nastyfew, aggregated by home.social.
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People moved right becouse the #deathcult pushing of insecurity and distrust has been uncomposted for 50 years
Currently we are to stuck in the liberal response to the current hard rightward shift, as they treat it like a fixed demographic fact. “Those people won't move.” “Those voters are lost.” “Reform has captured them.” then comes more polling, messaging, focus groups, electoral strategy and process. This is the #geekproblem applied to blinded #fashernist liberal politics: treating a living social system like a technical problem that can be managed from above. But people don't live […] -
To compost the #dotcons, the #openweb needs more people with shovels
Yes, the #web02 revolution was a con, it always was. The problem is now most people have spent years pretending that the dominant technology companies were somehow neutral actors - clever companies making useful tools, occasionally getting a little too powerful, occasionally needing a bit of regulation. But now this comforting chattering class story is harder to maintain, as the long "invisible" problem has finally reached the #mainstream, the act of stepping over the smoke and mirrors can […]https://hamishcampbell.com/to-compost-the-dotcons-the-openweb-needs-to-shovel-harder/
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The #openweb and projects such as the #OMN are more than technical alternatives
Techno #feudalism is a description of the power that large #dotcons technology platforms now have over the economy and society. The comparison is with medieval feudalism. Under feudalism, land was the critical means of production and ordinary people worked land they did not own. Lords controlled access to it and extracted rents or surplus from those who depended on it. This is relevant today were the critical bottleneck is increasingly digital capital: platforms, servers, algorithms, data, […] -
There is a wide gap between the people who talk about changing society and the people who actually have to live in the current mess
The #fashionista left problem isn't simply “bad messaging”, but the loss of relationships, class politics and ordinary participation. This left path is #blocking, leading to a serious problem, that there is a growing gap between the people who talk about changing society and the people who actually have to live with the consequences of the society we have. A lot of contemporary so-called left politics has become a culture of credentials, language, status and moral performance. Political […] -
The old system is already compost, the question is what we grow from this mess
We need to stop talking about “climate change” as though we are discussing a slightly inconvenient change in the weather. Climate change is too soft, too neutral. Climate change makes it sound as though something simply happened to us. It didn't, we pushed this mess, we built an economic system that treats the living world as raw material, turns everything into property, pushes everything through markets and then calls the resulting destruction “growth”. The next twenty years will be […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-old-system-is-already-compost-the-question-is-what-we-grow-from-it/
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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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Grassroots #openweb infrastructure is need for a different future
For 50 years we have worshipped the #deathcult - endless growth, extraction, competition and individualism - and now we are living with the damage that this has done to our society and the living world. The current hard shift to the right won't fix any of this, it simply empowers the #nastyfew to surf the apocalypse while more and more of us are left fighting over the scraps. Blind hatred and political ignorance are not solutions. Neither is pretending that the past 50 years of "common […]https://hamishcampbell.com/grassroots-openweb-infrastructure-is-need-for-a-different-future/
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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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Our failure to mediate the mess
The current #AI boom is built on a huge contradiction, you can see this in #mainstreaming terms. That AI companies are not paying the real costs of what they consume. They haven't paid for the copyrighted material they trained on. They haven't paid the environmental costs of the water and electricity they use. They haven't paid for the pressure they place on public infrastructure, or for the social costs of flooding the web with synthetic content. Yet AI services are sold below their true […] -
Techno feudalism what changes
There’s a common understanding that we’re living inside a new digital world, that feels like enclosure, where people are "controlled" by platforms they can’t easily leave, where behaviour is shaped at scale, and where #AI intensifies this mess. That’s why #fashernista terms like #technofeudalism are being used to argue that we’ve moved beyond capitalism into something different - a system based not primarily on profit, but on rent extraction through “cloud capital.” In this […] -
Climate Chaos, the reality, heat, collapse, and denial
A red warning for extreme heat has been issued across parts of the UK this week, including London. For people this heatwave across Europe feels frightening, not because of the temperatures themselves, but of what they imply. Nights stay hot, bodies don’t recover, systems don’t cool down. The baseline is shifting. The question that keeps coming up is simple and unavoidable - if this is what it’s like now, what is it like in 10, 20, 30 years? The answer is not uncertain, it is more heat, […]https://hamishcampbell.com/climate-chaos-the-reality-heat-collapse-and-denial/
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Technology is never just a tool
Let's be clear on the background mess, before the personal attacks start, this is not about individuals. It is about patterns, systems and ideas. The danger is that criticism becomes an #adHominem argument - “you just dislike this because…” - instead of looking at the actual structures being discussed. The point I am making is that parts of dead #postmodern thinking have ended up embedded inside #neoliberal culture: fragmentation, individual identity, endless discourse and difficulty […] -
#Nicenasty the hidden power of soft obstruction
People think in groups, that's normal. The mistake isn't group thinking itself, it's pretending we're all isolated individuals while still acting through tribes, identities, and social blocs. A lot of today's "common sense" comes from the #stupidindividualism group mindset. We are encouraged to see every problem through individual choices rather than collective realities. The real question isn't "how do we stop group thinking?" It's "what do we do with it?" This mess is something we need to […]https://hamishcampbell.com/nicenasty-the-hidden-power-of-soft-obstruction/
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Existing vocabulary:
#nastyfew - the overlords: tech, business, political power. Works well, already established.
#fluffy - comfortable, non-threatening, conflict-avoiding activism. Well understood in context.
#spiky - confrontational, direct, willing to cause friction.
The gap is something more specific: the person who performs niceness or fluffiness as a *weapon* - who uses social respectability, politeness norms, or community goodwill as a way to enforce conformity, block challenge, and protect their own position. Not the #nastyfew (they're openly powerful) and not simply #fluffy (that's just timid). This is the *vile* fluffy - nice on the surface, actively harmful underneath.
Options:
#nicenasty -. Has rhythm, easy to remember, does the job. The inversion is the point.
#velvetblock - soft surface, hard obstruction. More descriptive of the *mechanism*.
#fluffygate- implies gatekeeping behind a fluffy front. A bit clunky.
#pratocracy - the rule of prats. Funny but loses the specific nice/nasty dynamic.#softpower - already taken in international relations, would cause confusion.
#vilefluff - pairs well with #nicenasty tag, keep it in the vocabulary
#nicenasty is the strongest - it's immediately, has no baggage, and does what a hashtag should do: compress a complex dynamic into something people recognise and use to organise the moment they hear it.
The question is whether one tag or two. #nastyfew for power from above, #nicenasty for obstruction from within the community itself, #fluffy for the timid. A clean three-part vocabulary?
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Thinking about a new hashtag - #nicenasty for our #vilefluffy crew... or maybe "prat". We already have #nastyfew for our overlords in both tech, business are politics...
Ideas? What do people think?
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Thatcher, Reagan were the wrecking crew: How we keep pushing mess
This story is about the ideology that won. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two politicians on either side of the Atlantic didn’t only win elections, they reshaped what people came to accept as “common sense.” Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States did not invent capitalism’s worst tendencies, but they gave them state power, institutional infrastructure, and ideological legitimacy. What they built was not simply a set of policies, it was a social […]https://hamishcampbell.com/thatcher-reagan-were-the-wrecking-crew-how-we-pushed-the-current-mess/
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The End of the “Peace Dividend” and the Return of History
#Identitypolitics, is what happens when liberalism turns inward and fragments - call it mad liberalism. #Culturewar is what happens when that same liberalism hardens and lashes out - bad liberalism. Both look like opposites, but they come from the same place. The uncomfortable part is both were pushed onto the "left" as the way to fight #neoliberalism the very system that’s been tearing apart the social fabric for decades. Instead of building collective power, we pushed endless identity […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-end-of-the-peace-dividend-and-the-return-of-history/
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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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#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 - burning community trust, institutional memory, and activist energy in the process while leaving the underlying #nastyfew power structures completely untouched.
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#classwar is the ongoing and unacknowledged conflict between those who benefit from and actively reproduce the #deathcult of #neoliberalism - the #nastyfew, managing, and credentialed classes - and the communities, workers, and ecosystems they exploit, a conflict that #mainstreaming culture works to render invisible, reframing systemic dispossession as individual failure.
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“Digital sovereignty” is more mess we need to compost
The servent of the #nastyfew wispering in the ear of the #deathcult ists liberals From a #OMN perspective, the mess isn’t just the wording - it’s the ideology embedded in the wording, and how that shapes behaviour over time. “Digital sovereignty” sounds harmless, progressive in a liberal policy context. But if you run this through a #KISS ideological lens, its more mess rooted in control, borders, and authority - concepts historically tied to state power. That’s why it’s so easy […]https://hamishcampbell.com/digital-sovereignty-is-more-mess-we-need-to-compost/
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How the #nastyfew make the mess we need to compost https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRj65O5RTnc
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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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@Npars01 @gabrielesvelto it's the definition of evil #nastyfew
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Added a global section to this local post. The tragedy isn’t that technology failed, it is more that we let our technological imagination be captured by oligarchs. Prometheus gave humanity fire so we could build civilization together, not so a tiny #nastyfew tech CEOs can privatise the flame and sell back the light.
The real question isn’t whether technology will shape the future, it’s who controls it. Disciplined curiosity beats IQ, Oxford https://hamishcampbell.com/disciplined-curiosity-beats-iq-oxford/
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Disciplined curiosity beats IQ, Oxford
There is a persistent myth pushed in our culture that intelligence - high IQ, academic credentials, elitist education - leads naturally to clear thinking. My organic experience suggests the opposite, what matters is disciplined, skeptical, freethinking curiosity. Without that, intelligence simply becomes a tool for defending whatever assumptions people already hold. This is one of the reasons many academic environments produce people who are, bluntly, credulous. Not because they lack […]https://hamishcampbell.com/disciplined-curiosity-beats-iq-oxford/
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"To start to compost this mess we need to get back to rebooting an alternative, for twenty years I’ve been arguing that we urgently need to reboot a working alternative. A good place to start is the #openweb as the mainstream web is dominated by corporate platforms tightly coupled to capital and intelligence ecosystems. We cannot keep debating inside systems owned by the #NastyFew and expect any structural change.
We need #4opens publishing infrastructure, federated networks with transparent governance and community hosting to build protocol-level resilience infrastructure."
https://hamishcampbell.com/the-nastyfew-are-not-hidden-theyre-integrated/
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The #NastyFew Are Not Hidden – They’re Integrated
The #NastyFew are not hiding in the shadows, they’re integrated. The so-called “Epstein files” are not the record of one predator. They are a snapshot of how #mainstreaming works at elitist levels, a map of proximity around the people who default-run the mess we call society. Billionaires. Prime ministers. Cabinet officials. Tech founders. Bankers. Cultural icons. From Bill Gates to Elon Musk. From Reid Hoffman to Peter Thiel. From Ehud Barak to Prince Andrew. Different countries. […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-nastyfew-are-not-hidden-theyre-integrated/
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@slashdottir https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/uk-attitudes-toward-conflict-israel-and-gaza the majority of people in the UK are against the genocide, the small minority are actively for it, we should #KISS call these people evil.
This will take away a bit of support for the #nastyfew who control this mess https://hamishcampbell.com/mess-can-be-less-about-thinking-and-more-about-strategy-understanding-this-we-shift-the-talk-to-focus-more-on-evil/
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Radical Reductions in Inequality
The current #dotcons economy is not neutral, it is designed to centralise control in the interest of the #nastyfew, platform owners, server landlords, data hoarders. These are the financial intermediaries who extract value without producing social good, this is not an accident or a side effect, it is the business model. We are told that inequality is the natural outcome of innovation, talent, and efficiency. In reality, it is engineered through enclosure. Digital infrastructure that could […]https://hamishcampbell.com/radical-reductions-in-inequality/