The Curious Engineer

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#OMN (Open Media Network)

hamishcampbell.com

Hamish Campbell an #openweb organic intellectual and technologist

Society / politics / economyTech news / industryEssays / personal

’10’15’20’25
Posts
1,936 from 25 Jul 2006 to 28 Oct 2026
Posting
about daily (281 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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https://hamishcampbell.com/feed/

Latest

October 2026

  1. The #OMN path is about the stories we tell to make technology acceptable
  2. The #openweb is a network of links, not islands
  3. The Tragedy of Soviet Market Economists: Civilizing Russia, or whitewashing Neoliberalism?
  4. Composting and the Commons: Oxford’s Riverbank and the Fediverse
  5. The uncomfortable question
  6. Composting and the Commons: Oxford’s Riverbank and the Fediverse
  7. #OMN: WHERE NEXT? WE HAVE SEED FUNDING, NOW COMES WORK
  8. A Lesson in Social Composting
  9. Please get off your knees and pick up a shovel
  10. A reminder, what is the #OMN
  11. We need people learning how to work together
  12. The Open Media Network (#OMN) is both shovel and social path to dig the #Fediverse out of the #mainstreaming crap
  13. Why technologists need the #4opens
  14. Composting the mess, growing the alternative commons paths
  15. The #AI mess
  16. What do we need to compost in social tech?
  17. Pause fixing each mess in isolation, building process that composts mess into more useful paths
  18. We are entering a period of overlapping crises
  19. Composting the Last Five Years of the Fediverse
  20. Democratic Resilience: a report back
  21. Be realistic about how power actually works
  22. Technology can secure the commons, it should never become a substitute for the commons
  23. Why does the #Fediverse exist?
  24. When mainstreaming colonize the things that work
  25. Pick up the shovels to start growing the commons, that’s the #OMN path
  26. Can the #openweb reboot scale without copying the #dotcons?

September 2026

  1. The answer to the #dotcons isn’t everyone becoming a sysadmin
  2. Turning the lifeboat electric – Solar Power for down-river cruising
  3. #AI mythology is currently more of the same
  4. The #deathcult is selling the future as #techshit
  5. If we fund only the technical layer, we shouldn’t be surprised when the social layer remains broken
  6. Bunker as a metaphor
  7. Why “common sense” is a cage – we don’t have to worship this mess
  8. The #openweb is #4opens, where dues this place the current #AI path?
  9. A story about our normal path
  10. People moved right becouse the #deathcult pushing of insecurity and distrust has been uncomposted for 50 years
  11. Outreaching, what is the #OMN?
  12. To compost the #dotcons, the #openweb needs more people with shovels
  13. Power stays with the people doing the work
  14. Life on a Lifeboat: Where Next?
  15. #NLnet we are still waiting for an opportunity

August 2026

  1. Trust matters, community matters, participation matters
  2. The #openweb and projects such as the #OMN are more than technical alternatives
  3. Institution create the behaviour they claim merely to measure – Economics → institutions → behaviour → the #deathcult
  4. 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
  5. The old system is already compost, the question is what we grow from this mess
  6. This is the Web 1.5
  7. Rethinking commons
  8. The expertise problem
  9. Trust and the trustless mess
  10. The blocking happens when criticism becomes a substitute for action
  11. Just put a # in front of words
  12. The Politics of Ignorance
  13. The language around #climatechaos is changing
  14. Religion, mystery and the #openweb
  15. OMN: Activity, culture and why Soviet experiments matter
  16. The individual, is not, the starting point for the #OMN
  17. Public conversation about public problems
  18. The #openweb needs diversity, not monoculture
  19. This summer #climatechaos
  20. Grassroots #openweb infrastructure is need for a different future
  21. The #OMN and the fight against the #dotcons
  22. Living through twenty years of #dotcons addiction
  23. Feelings/facts, stupidindividualism is about peoples role in systems
  24. Media, the deathcult and climatechaos
  25. The Fediverse is fun and growing, but it seems to kinda be on autopilot at the moment

July 2026

  1. How liberal media tries to “fix” liberal media
  2. The #Deathcult is a historical metaphor
  3. The mess, the Commons, and the Paths Out of Mess
  4. Make the #4opens fashionable
  5. Europe’s digital sovereignty needs challenges
  6. This was my thinking on the Fediverse a few years ago – building commons
  7. Why #FOSS matters socially
  8. Online Chat is a social problem, not just a technical one
  9. A hybrid p2p look at the OMN
  10. Our failure to mediate the mess
  11. The hidden costs of worshipping the #deathcult
  12. Why we use the #deathcult hashtag
  13. The #4opens: A Practical Compass for the #openweb
  14. Which Nature Are We Growing?
  15. Stupid Individualism: How We End Up Fighting Over Nothing
  16. Techno feudalism what changes
  17. The culture of #FOSS

June 2026

  1. We are living through a dangerous moment
  2. Oxford boaters every day commons
  3. Boat Refurbishment Volunteer Weekend Plan
  4. The commons and the problem of power
  5. Climate Chaos, the reality, heat, collapse, and denial
  6. Technology is never just a tool
  7. Violence, Nonviolence the Missing Commons Question
  8. The tools we need to compost the #deathcult
  9. The Fluffy Trap is when Activism forgets the spiky path
  10. Rainbow Culture: The Dream, the Mess and the Commons
  11. The Rainbow Lesson: Building Commons Beyond the Market
  12. Beyond AI
  13. Why WhatsApp plebiscites, and #dotcons in general are a crude and negative democratic instrument
  14. When Technologists Forget the Warning
  15. Rethinking Grassroots Tech Funding
  16. The Transition Mess
  17. Rebuilding Shared Meaning in a Fragmented World
  18. Working Groups, Horizontal Organising, and Getting Things Done
  19. #Nicenasty the hidden power of soft obstruction
  20. The dogma of one path: why alternatives, diversity and linking matter more
  21. Build it permissionlessly and let it loose
  22. Who controls the story of harm? Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and institutional anti-racism
  23. The Fediverse’s growing signal-to-noise problem – and who’s causing it
  24. The non-action bloc: resignation, cynicism, and the culture that keeps people powerless
  25. AI didn’t break the web. The dotcons did – AI just turned up the volume
  26. OMN history note: Failbook, activism, and the enclosure of organising
  27. The EU tech sovereignty plan
  28. How we built the neoliberal #Deathcult
  29. The commons were never theory – It was always practice
  30. Thatcher, Reagan were the wrecking crew: How we keep pushing mess

May 2026

  1. The everyday con: How the #deathcult turns crisis into extraction
  2. Something I’ve been sitting with and want to share honestly
  3. The 20th century imagination was heavily shaped by engineering thinking
  4. SAVE THAMES RIVER HOMES
  5. Compost “digital sovereignty”, build working commons
  6. Sophists – From Ancient Greece to the current #mainstreaming
  7. The exhaustion of thinking out loud, why engagement matters
  8. Composting the mess of digital security in activism – We need to talk about this, offline
  9. Turning stress, conflict, and exhaustion into commons culture instead of mutual destruction
  10. People ask why the articles are hard to follow without background, it’s a fair point
  11. A fluff view of current tech we need to compost
  12. Treating everything as personal conflict is a dead end
  13. People resist visible structure
  14. The #encryptionist detour
  15. The Meta-Mess of the “Open” Social Web

April 2026

  1. The Problem Was Never Just the Platforms – It’s What We Build Instead
  2. The Crew – Paths to Growth?
  3. The End of the “Peace Dividend” and the Return of History
  4. Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN
  5. #OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)
  6. People pushing vertical common sense over horizontal process are prats
  7. In the real world
  8. A fresh look at the mess we need to compost
  9. The hashtag story is messy, that’s the Point
  10. “Digital sovereignty” is more mess we need to compost
  11. People, Process, and the Myth of Difficulty
  12. What we’re growing at Oxford Boaters is simple
  13. Closed systems protect individuals, but they rarely build movements
  14. Trust and fear – the spiky/fluff debate – OxfordBoaters
  15. We keep making mess, then wondering why everything smells
  16. The #dotcons, #mainstreaming, and Build to Walk Away
  17. Toward Healthier Digital Public Spaces: A Cultural and Structural Challenge
  18. EU taking the open web path?
  19. Beyond Blocking: Building Trust Infrastructure for the Open Web
  20. Why you should help
  21. What happened over the last ten years on our Fediverse path
  22. So how do we mediate this fear?

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