Our liberals talking about the death of #postmodernism

https://hamishcampbell.com/our-liberals-talking-about-the-death-of-postmodernism/

In tech, the last 20 years have been a mess of #fashernista trends and the ongoing #geekproblem, a compost heap of broken promises and abandoned projects. It's obvious if you lift the lid and really look. The glossy hype fades fast, the rot underneath remains.

Much of what we call "innovation" ended up as #techshit - rushed, bloated, short-sighted code that needs serious composting if we’re going to grow anything real. #Openweb dreams have been buried under a #dotcons landfill.

The real challenge now isn’t just pointing at the pile (fun as that can be), it's handing the next generation proper shovels - real tools, real critical thinking, real spaces for building rooted, resilient, open tech.

A hopeful note: some #fashernistas are starting to apologize and acknowledge the mess. That's good compost material too. Let's keep composting. Let's keep planting.

We stopped critiquing. We stopped questioning. We let the rot build up, hoping it would turn into something useful on its own. Instead, we got layers of #techshit, digital infrastructure that isolates instead of connects, surveillance wrapped in UX design, and a generation seduced by #stupidindividualism on the #dotcons. Tech became the default priesthood, and any challenge to its orthodoxy was treated as luddite heresy. Meanwhile, real mutual aid got rebranded as tip jars and GoFundMe links, stripped of its radical solidarity. We’ve been too afraid to call this out, too fragmented to organize, too polite to fight. Well, fuck polite. It's time to get messy.

https://hamishcampbell.com

Messy language feeds back into our culture

The #blocking of current action, the constant stalls, confusion, and fragmentation, has a lot to do with the mess our language makes. And the deeper issue is how this messy language feeds back into our culture, which then loops back to make the language even murkier. It’s a feedback loop that clouds meaning, erodes trust, and paralyses collective action.

The last 40 years of postmodernism and neo-liberalism have made this worse. #Postmodernism chipped away at the idea of shared reality, […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/messy-language-feeds-back-into-our-culture/

Finding a path in a messy world

Let’s get this out of the way, most new tech projects are pointless. That’s not an insult, it’s a cultural symptom. People are pushing things not because they’re useful, but because they can. And when every shovel is used to dig holes in sand, we’re not building anything, we’re flailing.

From this experience, let’s build culture, not just code, because here's the hard truth, we’re losing the reboot of the #openweb by failing to nurture it. Yes, #mainstreaming people are […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/finding-a-path-in-a-messy-world/

The #OMN is not a product — It’s a path you walk

The #OMN project is #DIY, it only works if we build it together. This isn’t a startup pitch. It’s not a platform that magically appears out of nowhere to fix everything. It’s not a product to consume, it’s a path you walk. The direction is participatory, not passive. You don’t get to sit back and clap… or boo from the sidelines. If you do, the system won’t collapse, but it sure as hell won’t grow.

Let’s be direct, there is no saviour coder, no NGO white knight, no […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/the-omn-is-not-a-product-its-a-path-you-walk/

The #OMN project is #DIY, it only works if communities of people actually build it. This isn’t a path of passive consumption; it’s a participatory direction. If people choose to sit on their hands, or act the prat and critique from the sidelines, the system doesn’t collapse… but it doesn’t grow either.

That said, even if the building doesn’t happen right away, there’s still deep value in the memory, the documents, the ideas, the patterns. It’s compost for future builders. If we can’t get our act together now, the next group will dig it up, learn from it, and build better.

Right now, for me, #makinghistory archiving project is a still-doable foundation, a living memory layer that gives us something solid to stand on. Without memory, we spin in circles around the same old #techshit heap, repeating mistakes, retelling the same half-lost stories, and falling into the same traps. That’s not progress, it’s rot.

We’re now working on bootstrapping this archive project as the first step. If we don’t remember soon, many of us, and our histories, will be lost in the storm of #climatechaos. In the end, if we don’t build, we don’t change.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/tech/news/european-industry-big-win-germany-france-both-support-sovereign-eu-based-tech-infrastructure/ Now we need clear thinking and process not to tern this into #fahernista #techshit, how not to simply poor the resources down the drain. One some part of this is affective grassroots atavism to compost the mess as it spreads from the centre, to feed the seedling that do sprout. https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=EU+funding

If we’re going to break out of this death spiral, we have to bypass the endemic #techshit. This is where activist-led projects like the #OMN come in—creating new spaces rooted in solidarity, shared stories, and collective action. The Urgent Need for Collective Action https://hamishcampbell.com/the-urgent-need-for-collective-action/

News, the signal-to-noise mess

Almost all our posting in the #openweb and in the #dotcons in response to #mainstreaming news is noise. It’s reactive, fragmented, performative. We scroll, we rage, we boost, we dunk, but we don’t build. Sometimes, someone posts something thoughtful, something deep, meaningful. But it vanishes in the churn. The system is designed this way.

Even on our #openweb, where we have more autonomy, we are mirroring this spectacle path, feeding it attention, reposting its narratives, amplifying […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/news-the-signal-to-noise-mess/

Mainstreaming: Building Grassroots Balance

Our history of involvement in #EU digital outreach and policy meetings has made one thing starkly clear, our #openweb is deeply entangled in the process of #mainstreaming, a messy, often co-optive dynamic where grassroots voices are softened, diluted, and redirected into bureaucracy, then in the end they are simply #blocked. Yes, while there is value in taking part, it's also a wake-up call.

The push to shape digital paths from above is strong. But without active grassroots alternatives, […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/mainstreaming-building-grassroots-balance/

Be FOR Something, Not Against Everything https://hamishcampbell.com/be-for-something-not-just-against-everything/ This isn’t only tech philosophy, it’s a practical shovel to compost the #techshit we’ve, suffocating buried under. Let’s build some bridges, not walls

Struggling for a Real Alternative

For the last 5 years conversations have been about, the #Fediverse, #Web3 and more recently the pushing of #mainstreaming into the #openweb native path. But despite this, the #fediverse is still a notable outlier in the digital landscape. This is in part because unlike the dominant tech trends, which emerge from Silicon Valley and the cross-Atlantic #dotcons agenda, the #fediverse is rooted in European ideals of decentralization, federation, and digital autonomy, it's a "native" #openweb […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/struggling-for-a-real-alternative/

#Techshit Hype – #NothingNew

The is nothing new to pointing out that our #fashionistas #mainstreaming crew push mess. Remember when drone deliveries were going to revolutionize shopping? When every major news outlet unthinkably reported that we’d have autonomous quadcopters dropping off toothpaste and Amazon boxes on our doorsteps?

Or when 3D TVs were the future of entertainment, pushed so aggressively that manufacturers stopped making non-3D models for a while? Where are they now? Rotting covered in dust in […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/techshit-hype-nothingnew/

YOU can’t do social change without annoying people. We need to stop chasing distractions and focus on real accountability. Composting the #TechShit https://hamishcampbell.com/composting-the-techshit/

Composting the #TechShit

The value of the #Fediverse isn’t in the tech specs. It’s not in the #ActivityPub protocol or the code itself, those are tools. The value lies in the culture that birthed it. The #Fediverse is the living embodiment of the #openweb, not some #VC Silicon Valley plaything. But as money floods in, as #mainstreaming forces try to turn it into another hollow platform, we risk losing the very thing that makes it powerful, its strong decentralized, trust-based roots.The looming battle is […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/composting-the-techshit/

Horizontalists understand that theory comes from practice, not the other way around. The foundation of this is #DIY, working practice first, then building theory from real-world experience. Starting with abstract theory leads to a dizzy mess and more #techshit to compost and academic wankery.

Good horizontalists understand that theory comes from practice, not the other way around. The foundation of this is #DIY, working practice first, then building theory from real-world experience. Starting with abstract theory leads to a dizzy mess that results in more #techshit to compost or, at worst, academic wankery.