#techshit — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #techshit, aggregated by home.social.
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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, […] -
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, […] -
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, […] -
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 […] -
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 #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 #encryptionist detour
Let’s 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 real harms of our worship of the (same […] -
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 #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 […] -
#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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#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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The Tech “Empiricism” Problem
A recent essay on deadSimpleTech makes a point the #openweb community should hear: the biggest problem in technology is not only the tools, it’s also the culture behind them. For years the tech world has operated under a form of narrow “tech empiricism”: the belief that if something produces results quickly, then it must be working well. In this mindset, success is measured by novelty, speed of production, and the ability to create something new. The heroes of this culture are […] -
A bit of #OMN history and where the current paths come from
For a long time the focus has been on solving two linked problems - both of which are actually #nothingnew. The first is grassroots publishing and organising. The second is network coordination between communities. Neither of these problems started with the internet, and they certainly didn’t start with Silicon Valley. Projects like #Indymedia and community organising networks solved these problems culturally long before modern platforms existed. They worked through shared practice, trust […]https://hamishcampbell.com/a-bit-of-omn-history-and-where-the-current-paths-come-from/
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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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OMN: Broken Institutions, and the Need to Rebuild the Commons
For progressive and radical people, one of the central political questions of our time is simple to ask but hard to answer - Why is it so difficult to rebuild the institutions that were destroyed in our #deathcult worship of the 1980s and 1990s? And more importantly why does the impossibility of rebuilding them make it so hard to change the needed balance of power in society? These question matters for working on the future of the society and most importantly the grassroots part of this: […]https://hamishcampbell.com/omn-broken-institutions-and-the-need-to-rebuild-the-commons/
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OMN: Broken Institutions, and the Need to Rebuild the Commons
For progressive and radical people, one of the central political questions of our time is simple to ask but hard to answer - Why is it so difficult to rebuild the institutions that were destroyed in our #deathcult worship of the 1980s and 1990s? And more importantly why does the impossibility of rebuilding them make it so hard to change the needed balance of power in society? These question matters for working on the future of the society and most importantly the grassroots part of this: […]https://hamishcampbell.com/omn-broken-institutions-and-the-need-to-rebuild-the-commons/
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Europe, the Fediverse, and the story we failed to tell
A bunch of native #openweb people spent real time, energy, and focus pushing the #EU toward the #Fediverse. This wasn’t theoretical, it wasn’t speculative, it wasn’t a #NGO whitepaper or a #VC funding pitch. It was practical outreach, grounded in working technology and lived experience, aimed at reducing Europe’s dependency on centralized corporate platforms. One concrete moment of this work was the webinar organised between the European Commission and the ActivityPub community: […]https://hamishcampbell.com/europe-the-fediverse-and-the-story-we-failed-to-tell/
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A bunch of native #openweb people spent time, energy and focus pushing the #EU toward the #Fediverse:
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/webinar-with-the-european-commission-and-ap-community/1507
That webinar mattered. It showed that EU institutions were open to #ActivityPub as a way to reduce dependency on centralized corporate platforms.
This is exactly the kind of work we need more of, not less. So what went wrong?
Instead of building on this momentum, the grassroots fell to mess and attention drifted back to the familiar #dotcons. Which, in the end, is just more #techshit to compost later.
SocialHub itself documents this blocking story, but there’s little aggregation or narrative continuity
The missing piece: our own history. This story still hasn’t been properly told:
We are very bad at telling our own history. And that failure has consequences.
When people don’t know: that #EU–#Fediverse outreach already happened, that viable alternatives already exist, that these paths were actively neglected,
So that they fall — again and again — for the #dotcons mess, believing it’s the only “realistic” option.
This is exactly why #OMN, #indymediaback, #makinghistory, and #OGB matter.
Before we argue about funding, platforms, or scale, we need: Media to tell the story properly. History to remember what already worked. Governance to keep power visible and contestable
Only then can Europe regain any path to grassroots digital agency without reproducing the same capture dynamics under a different flag.
If we don’t tell our story, someone else will, and it won’t be told in our interests.
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We fucked up… and that matters because we still have agency
Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth: we fucked up the last 20 years of #openweb tech. Not “they” fucked it up. Not only #BigTech, not only venture capital, not only governments and surveillance states. We did, especially those of us who were closest to the tools, the protocols, the decisions - the geeks, developers, architects, and maintainers who shaped how this stuff actually worked in practice. That matters, because it means we still have direct power over what happens next. […]https://hamishcampbell.com/we-fucked-up-and-that-matters-because-we-still-have-agency/
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There is such a thing as society -and the #openweb depends on it
There is such a thing as society. The entire #openweb is built on that assumption 🙂Deny it, and everything collapses into noise, power grabs, and enclosure. That denial, dressed up today as “post-truth” - is killing us. Our current media ecology is broken. So called #AI and Google are no longer a useful way to find information about most things that actually matter. This isn’t accidental; it’s a structural #dotcons problem. Extraction, advertising, and algorithmic manipulation […]https://hamishcampbell.com/there-is-such-a-thing-as-society-and-the-openweb-depends-on-it/
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Building, what comes next?
#mainstreaming people are wilfully blind and alt people tend to be pessimistic, it's a problem. Historically, real social change doesn’t arrive by waiting for collapse. It arrives because people are active, they build alternatives in advance, strong enough to bridge the mess when existing systems fail and lose legitimacy. This isn’t theory. It’s how change has always happened. If you are interested in a better outcome, we need to remember, build first, collapse later is the lesson that […] -
“We, we, we,” they say – but who chooses the “we”?
Trump and Putin are the figureheads of the #deathcult and 3ed rate people like Staner are puppets. The #nastyfew, mostly invisible in the smoke and mirrors of #mainstreaming media, are the ones who push the "we". And they also invest in a part of our "progressive" paths, always much less affective than they need to be, let's look at this from the latest #AI tech the #dotcons and more importantly our own #NGO crew. The core of the #NGO mess: they claim to represent everyone, while foreclosing […]https://hamishcampbell.com/we-we-we-they-say-but-who-chooses-the-we/
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At best, the old #mainstreaming is about equality in worshipping the #deathcult
The old #mainstreaming was only in a limited way about freedom, we now need to focus on what it was about, equality in obedience. Equality in our blinded worship of the #deathcult: growth, consumption, competition, endless mess on a dying planet. That’s why #fashernista liberal progressivism is always a dead end problem, it plays radical, says radical, but composts nothing. At best, it sells rebellion as a lifestyle. It’s equality inside the system, not about freedom from it. We’ve […] -
Change is Freedom, Change is Life
You don’t get transformative change by building according to the incentives of the dominant system. A post inspired by rereading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia as part of the Utopia Reading Group in #Oxford “There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed Most people choose the easy path: they find […]https://hamishcampbell.com/change-is-freedom-change-is-life/
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The #AI bubble might be nastier than the Dot.com crash
The path the #mainstreaming in tech is taking is clear. #AI is fashion, the valuations are absurd, the cost structures unsustainable, and the hype cycle feels like it’s already outpacing reality. We’ve been here before, dot.com déjà vu. The #dotcons bubble of 2000 was built on fake demand and fantasy valuations. Venture capital flooded into half-baked platforms that promised to "reinvent" everything, while the effect was to hollow out and enclose the native #openweb. When the bubble […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-ai-bubble-might-be-nastier-than-the-dot-com-crash/
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The #dotcons drained the VC swamp and now guzzle from the mainstream corporate socialism
In the USA #techshit mess, #OpenAI is busy wrapping itself in the stars and stripes, pushing the fantasy of “democratic AI” while the democracy fig leaf is withering. This isn’t democracy - it’s branding. It’s the normal Silicon Valley laundering greed through the American imperialism. The #nastyfew, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Masayoshi Son, and the Saudis will do fine. They’ll gorge on taxpayer, subsides, pouring billions down the drain, just like the political as normal […] -
The #Hashtags Tell a Story: Building Trust in a Messy World
We live in a time of crisis. Climate, community, communication, all are breaking down. Our tools and platforms no longer serve us. To make sense of this, we need to tell stories. And in the digital world, hashtags are one of the most powerful ways we do this. But our hashtags don’t just tag, they trace the roots of our problems, and signpost paths out. Each one is a seed. Together, they are a map.#dotcons – From #openweb to walled gardens. Once, the internet was a place of openness, […]
https://hamishcampbell.com/the-hashtags-tell-a-story-building-trust-in-a-messy-world/
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Composting the#techshit funding
Not surprised. This is probably the 10th time we've applied to the #NLnet / #NGI fund over the years. Just heard back: our proposals for #OGB (Open Governance Body), #indymediaback, and #MakeingHistory were not selected - again. “We are very sorry that we cannot offer you support for your good efforts.” Sure, I, appreciate the polite brush-off again. But after so many rejections for solid, urgently needed tech projects that actually fit the funding goals, it's time to name what's […] -
Marking the difference between the #openweb and #closedweb
The last decades has seen a rapid shift toward #deathcult #mainstreaming, where the boundaries between #open and #closed have intentionally blurred, this is also mirrored in our alt cultures. The "common sense" #geekproblem confusion serves the interests of the #dotcons and the #deathcult, not the people. The language of the #hashtagstory can be used to sharpens this divide and give people the tools to see, thus act on, the reality of the paths they’re walking and engaging with. The […]https://hamishcampbell.com/clearly-marking-the-difference-between-the-openweb-and-the-closedweb/
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The #techshit #churning and #fashernista problem we have suffered from the last 15 years. Composting is a good use for #hashtags, but the is strong #blocking on this use.
The mess we have made with #postmodernism and #neoliberalisam of the last 40 years needs a path out of.
We can all agree it's a mess, can we agree to pick up shovels to compost this mess