The Bloody Days of Genoa

The Genoa G8 Summit protests, held from July 18 to 22, 2001, were a turning point in the global justice movement. More than 200,000 people converged on the medieval port city to block the summit and challenge the concentrated power of the world’s richest nations. A gathering of the #deathcult ideology, grinding the planet into dust for profit.

For many of us, the G8 represented everything wrong with the world: an unelected body shaping economic and social policy for billions without legitimacy, accountability, or consent. We travelled to Genoa not as isolated activists but as a living ecosystem of movements, anarchists, trade unionists, farmers, climate campaigners, media collectives, migrants’ rights groups, students, pacifists, the lot. We were there to resist and to build alternatives in the cracks.

Arriving in a besieged city, Genoa a few days before the demonstrations to help set up the Media Centre, for grassroots reporting. Genoa, though, felt nothing like a holiday town. Police were everywhere. Riot vans on street corners. Helicopters thudding overhead. The convergence centre was being built on the beach; just 100 yards away from the stadium, where police forces were massing in their thousands. Walking around felt like moving inside a tightening fist.

We slept in the camper van that first night, tucked beside a half-built marquee. At dawn, we joined the organisers at the Diaz school, the building that housed both the Genoa Social Forum and the Media Centre.

We requisition two PCs from other rooms, installed video editing softwer, and turned them into the only two shared editing stations in the building. One was upgraded with a new hard drive and FireWire card for DV footage, not that it mattered, because it broke on day two and never recovered. The analogue capture system we had brought did most of the work that went online.

On one of our first reporting trips, filming outside the police barracks beside the convergence centre, we were detained by undercover cops. More arrived. Then more. Ten or twelve by the end. They demanded our tapes. I refused. They checked our documents, questioned us for hours, and released us without charge. I secretly filmed some of them; two would resurface later outside the IMC on the night of the raid.

Driving around the city to document the expanding “red zone” – the militarised area blocking off the summit – we were detained twice more. Civil rights meant nothing here. The police behaved like a sovereign power unto themselves. That Orwellian twinge – the sense that you are inside a lawless machine – grew stronger every day.

When the City Turned Red. Then one protester, Carlo Giuliani, was shot dead by police. Fear rippled across the city. The IMC became a space threaded with arguments about what to do. People drifted away, hour by hour, some deciding the risks were too great. By midnight the centre had half emptied.

Then the screams came: “THE POLICE ARE COMING!”

Looking out the window, I saw nothing at first. Panic surged anyway, people barricading doors, grabbing bags, racing up staircases. Marion moved the archive tapes to the hiding place I’d scouted earlier: the water tower on the roof.

From the rooftop I filmed carabinieri smashing into the building next door, the Diaz Pertini school, with vans and sledgehammers. Chairs were used to break windows. Tables became battering rams. It was happening fast, shockingly fast. Then I saw them entering our stairwell.

The Diaz Raid: Running for Our Lives. I headed downstairs to check if the Media Centre itself was being stormed. Turning the stairwell corner, I came face-to-face with a fully armoured carabiniere charging upward, truncheon raised, panting with adrenaline. I spun and bolted. Two flights up, shouting, “They’re in the building!” I sprinted to the roof and slipped into the tower.

Inside the darkness, I whispered for Marion. No answer. I crept through the corridor of water tanks, lit only by the IR beam from my camera. Finally a small, terrified voice: “Turn the light off.” She had hidden behind the last tank, clutching tapes and equipment.

For hours, three, maybe four, we lay silent as the helicopter’s spotlight swept the windows. Police boots thudded across the roof. Below us, the city echoed with screams, crashes, and the chanted word “ASSASSINI.”

When the helicopter finally left, we emerged. The rooftop was scattered with stunned survivors. Downstairs, the destruction was total. Computers smashed. Hard drives ripped out. Doors hanging loose. The walls of the Diaz school across the street were painted with blood. Skin and hair stuck to corners. Piles of clothing soaked red. People moving like ghosts.

The Carabinieri had left their calling card.

What happened inside that school, was not policing. It was torture, humiliation, and fascist ritual. Ninety-three sleeping demonstrators were beaten so badly that the floors resembled a slaughterhouse. People hiding under tables or sleeping in bags were clubbed unconscious. A 65-year-old woman’s arm was broken. One student needed surgery for brain bleeding. Others had their teeth kicked out. One officer cut clumps of hair from victims as trophies.

Those who survived were taken to Bolzaneto detention centre, where the abuse continued: beatings, stress positions, pepper spray, threats of rape, and forced chants of “Viva il Duce!” and “Viva Pinochet!” A systematic, organised brutality. This wasn’t loss of control, it was ideology.

Aftermath: Truth in the Ruins. The Italian state tried to bury it all. But survivors, lawyers, journalists, and prosecutors fought for years. The European Court of Human Rights eventually ruled that Italy had committed grave human rights violations. But almost none of the officers served jail time. Politicians escaped entirely.

The police weren’t out of control. They were following a logic, the logic of protecting eliteists power against democratic dissent. The logic of the #deathcult. The logic that treats people as obstacles, not citizens. Genoa showed the world what happens when movements gain too much momentum: the mask drops.

And still, in that chaos, seeds were planted – #indymedia, #OMN, the global justice movement, the early #openweb – messy, hopeful, compost for future uprisings.

Diaz up in the water tower

Eastern Europe on a Zloty – Kraków to the Balkans

This adventure started out with a peace march. The Global Walk for a Liveable World had already crossed America once – LA to New York in ’89 – while I was drifting through Santa Cruz, not quite sure where the thing would begin or end. I drove across the States instead of walking it, then flew back across the Atlantic. Found out about the second stage in the usual sideways way, a line at the bottom of one of my mum’s Ribbon leaflets.

In March ’91 I rang the organisers in the States to offer help with the UK leg, expecting to join a team. They wrote back to say that, actually, I was the team. Three weeks of phone calls, letters, searching for beds for 60–100 people, then scaling it all down to 20–30, and a week before arrival they announced only two or three walkers were coming. In the end four people appeared at the Battersea Peace Pagoda. Two weeks of trudging to Dover, then waving them off with a polite promise that I “might meet them in Berlin.” Truthfully, the earnest Californian-spiritual-self-help tone grated. They meant well. It just wasn’t my culture.

Hitching to Berlin. Set off for Berlin anyway, in the middle of… whatever month it was. Hitchhiking out of London was the usual purgatory. Bus → tube → Greenwich ferry back and forth trying to find a good spot. The gale stole my new Panama hat and sent me scrambling down the Thames foreshore to find it. Eventually got a lift out to the usual hopeless nowhere on the edge of town.

Midnight ferry to Ostend. Cheap day return, slept outside under the stars remembering the S/Y Nana and the Atlantic. Wandering off the boat, slinging my bag over my shoulder, I bumped into a Turkish-Cypriot driver who offered me a ride. Ended up drinking coffee in a friend’s flat while they talked Turkish and showed each other swords. Another lift dropped me at a service station 20 miles on.

A blur of rides later I was wandering lost in a village near Arnhem, slip road off the motorway, none on. Five miles through villages and pine forest to find the on-ramp. Lift to Hanover outskirts, dusk coming in, then, while trudging up the slip road, a ride all the way to Berlin. Stopped at the old border checkpoint at sunset. Dover to Berlin in 23 hours with a single hour’s sleep: exhausted but, strangely, the best way to do it.

Berlin: Unification or Just Glue? Dropped ten miles outside the city at midnight. S-Bahn staff surly, East Berliners insecure and unhelpful. Missed one train because nobody would point at the correct platform. Finally reached central East Berlin at 2am. Wandered empty streets, waited for tourist offices to open at eight. Everything misprinted, misdirected, kaput. Eventually found the address, a big communal house in the leafy suburbs, with activists, squatters, campaign groups, home turf of sorts. The Walk had left the day before. Slept. Woke late. Looked around Berlin. Got a Polish visa. Visited an old friend. Drifted.

Into Poland with the Walk. Caught up with one of the walkers, joined for a couple of days. Trudged into a village where we lounged on the grass eating bananas and ice cream while an old woman peered suspiciously through her curtains. A drunk man on a bicycle invited me fishing.

We camped two days beside a lake: sandy beach, forest, dragonflies, lilies, beavers. No tent, so I colonised a new picnic hut with a thatched roof half a mile around the lake. On the last night there was a party across the water with East Germans, Russian soldiers’ wives, and a group of Chernobyl kids. Vodka, folk songs, Beatles tunes until late.

Too tired and drunk to walk back to the hut I slept on the beach under my banner. Half-dreaming I felt a damp snout rooting at my neck. Sat up to see a small wild boar scamper away. Lay back down. Fifteen minutes later another attempted entry into my sleeping bag. Another boar.

Poland. Frankfurt-Oder → Poland Proper, Left the walk at Frankfurt-Oder, crossed the river, no border guards, no stamp. Changed a bit of money without knowing the rate. Hitchhiked through poorer, rougher towns. One couple gave me a lift, suspicious at first. When they realised I was from England their faces lit up: they’d never met anyone from “the West.”

In Wrocław, grey, rattling trams, I wandered two hours to a youth hostel that had closed years ago, then back again to the one I’d already passed. Looked for a tent; the shops offered nothing light, small or cheap. Took the train to Kraków instead.

Kraków, one of Europe’s great fairytale cities. Old town wrapped in green parkland, the filled-in moat. Enormous square crowned by the cathedral, a stone-roofed market hall, and a tower straight out of wizards and alchemists. Sat watching the Poles watch the Hare Krishnas dance.

Day trip hitching to Auschwitz with a young Jewish American, his first time hitching. Warm, generous people en route, which helped soften the horror of the camp: the endless wooden huts, the rails, the exhibitions. Romania’s display was the clearest; Hungary’s and Czech Republic’s had aged badly.

High Tatras. Bus to Zakopane, then on to Kuźnice. Walked two hours up into alpine meadows and pine paths. Stayed two nights in a mountain lodge built of giant boulders among firs. Walked barefoot to a lake at dusk, ice water numbing, snow on the shore. Two sunsets in one day after climbing a higher ridge. Back to tea, talk, and sleep, until a bear rummaging in the firewood woke everyone.

Walked five hours across ridges to Czechoslovakia. Pure mountain beauty: bilberries, moss-padded rock, icy streams, butterflies, deer crashing through undergrowth. Border guards grumpy about my missing stamp. Gave an old woman money and postcards to post, as there was no postbox at the crossing.

Slovakia: High and Low Tatras. Hitchhiked around: one lift from an obnoxious “entrepreneur” pushing overpriced rooms. Stayed two days in a cheap tourist motel, rode a forest tram to a surprisingly modern ski resort. Bought a tent for 2,100 crowns.

A Dutch couple took me to the ice caves, then to Dedinky, a lakeside village in the Low Tatras. Stayed four days. Lost half my clothes from a washing line and had my watch stolen at a birthday party. Thunderstorms, flooded tent, dubious rum, questionable hospitality.

Gypsies offered goulash and too much alcohol. Wandering deer-stalks with my camera. A glade so full of butterflies they landed on my jacket for the salt. Tea with syrup in the pub. Eventually hitched south and the last lift to the Hungarian border was, luckily, with Neo-Nazis who didn’t speak English.

Hungary. Walked across the border. Hitched halfway to Budapest in a Trabant with a new western Polo engine. The driver was proud until a giant French Citroën swept past; then he was crushed. The west in one gesture: effortless superiority, consumer glamour.

Budapest: big, beautiful, bullet-scarred. Wandered museums, fought off born-again Christians and McDonald’s kids. Lost my passport and found it again. Ate pastries and fruit for under a pound.

Caught a train to Szolnok. Wandered markets. Watched Russian helicopters drop paratroopers in dust clouds. Hitchhiked into a storm, huge drops, lightning, no lifts. Finally pitched my tent in a hollow outside Püspökladány, mosquitoes murderous, only sweets for dinner.

Next day: a lift with a Romanian to the border. Almost into Romania proper until visas and bribes made it impossible on my dwindling cash. Lunch of salted cheese and pickled vegetables. Foul orange drink. Backtrack.

Yugoslavia Approaches: Truckers, War Talk, Rain. English truckers took me under their wing. Rumours, hatred of Yugoslav drivers, endless cynical war talk. Rain hammered down. Hail. Under-bridge shelters. A hotel full of dancing wedding guests. A lonely prostitute named Gorge offering cigarettes and small kindnes. Long night. No lifts.

Eventually an English truck to Niš, avoiding the Croatian war zone. Dropped in a hotel in a storm that flooded the roads. More dancing, more waiting, more rain. Then stuck again, hitching useless.

Waited eight hours on a motorway. Walked off in frustration through dusty villages, sunflower fields, Soviet air bases, shepherds, rubbish dumps. Turned down buses. Took random side roads. A young man tried to help but we couldn’t communicate. Found a café owner who spoke French; they invited me to stay.

A Night in the Village. The café owner’s family fed me soup and bread and pálinka that could have cleaned engine parts. We talked in fragments of French and wild gestures. Their three kids stared at me like I was an escaped zoo animal. This was deep Yugoslavia, well off any tourist map, and I was the strange wanderer washed up by weather and bad timing.

They cleared a space for me to sleep on a narrow bed in the spare room. Old wallpaper peeling. A dog barking outside half the night. Rain on the tin roof. Perfect. Better than most hostels I’d paid for.

At dawn the café owner drove me back to the road, shook my hand with the elaborate warmth Balkan men have towards travellers, and wished me luck with the war. That was how people talked about Yugoslavia then, “the war” as if it were weather you might dodge if you timed the clouds.

Finally Moving Again. Two Orthodox priests in a green Lada dropped me near Skopje. They chain-smoked and offered philosophical commentary in a mix of Serbian, German, and what I think was half-remembered Latin. One of them insisted the devil lived in television aerials.

A trucker took me the rest of the way. The cab smelled of onions, diesel, and the sour damp of someone who slept in the cab too often. But he was kind, and he bought me a coffee from a kiosk that looked like it had been assembled from scrap during Tito’s time.

Skopje felt like a place trying to remember itself. Concrete modernist blocks, markets spilling fruit onto the pavement, the smell of grilled meat, the odd leftover fragment of Ottoman architecture poking up like a tooth. A city between eras.

I wandered the bazaar. Bought cherries so ripe they stained my fingers. Sat by the river watching young men throw themselves dramatically into the water to impress girls who pretended not to look. Same story everywhere in the world.

Spent the night on the floor of a dormitory where half the travellers were on their way to Istanbul and the other half had just escaped it.

South Again. Hitching out was slow. Eventually an Albanian family squeezed me into their car, seven people and me, limbs everywhere. They gave me boiled corn and water and argued loudly over whether I looked more like a German or a Spaniard.

Near the border, the father insisted on buying me lunch: greasy lamb tat I could not eat, tomatoes, bread like clouds. Hospitality thicker than the Balkan humidity. Crossed into Greece on foot. The border guard barely looked at my passport. I think he was half-asleep.

Northern Greece. Hitching here was easier. People were curious. Everyone wanted to talk politics, history, religion, football, and how Germany was ruining Europe. I learned quickly that agreeing with everyone was the safest option. Slept one night in an olive grove. Stars so sharp they felt like they could cut you. Woke to goats nosing the tent.

A trucker dropped me at the edge of Thessaloniki. Another city between worlds: Byzantine churches, grimy apartment blocks, and the sea shining like nothing was wrong anywhere.

End of the Road. I sat on the harbour wall watching ferries come and go. Backpack stained with rain, dust, and bad wine. Boots half-destroyed. No plan, no deadline, no proper money left. Just the quiet satisfaction of having walked, hitched, and lucked my way across a continent in a time when borders were dissolving and reforming beneath your feet.

You never really end these journeys. You just stop somewhere and breathe. The world keeps moving. You move with it.And eventually you turn the stories into compost for whatever comes next.

Towards Istanbul. From Thessaloniki, everything tilts gently downhill towards the East. The light changes. The air feels older. Even the road markings start to look like they were painted by someone who learned their craft from Byzantine mosaics.

I caught a lift with a fisherman in a battered blue pickup. Nets in the back, the faint smell of diesel and the sea following us inland. He didn’t say much, just offered me a cigarette every twenty minutes as if that were the correct dosage for crossing northern Greece. When we stopped at a roadside café he bought me a coffee strong enough to restart a small tractor.
He dropped me near Kavala, waved, and disappeared in a cloud of dust and fish-scented goodwill

Sleeping Rough, Thinking Too Much. I slept that night above a rocky beach, backpack for a pillow. The Aegean murmured below, waves rolling in like slow thoughts. I remember lying there thinking how strange it was, the world felt wide open then. Borders were just lines on paper. You could hitch from Scotland to the edge of Asia with nothing but a backpack, a half-broken map, and the soft confidence that strangers would mostly help you.

Trust-based travel. Pre-#dotcons, before fear culture colonised everything. Before algorithmic sorting. Before #deathcult narratives turned everyone into either a threat or a customer. It was all human-scale. Messy. Improvised. #KISS by default.

Crossing Into Turkey. The next morning a Greek–Turkish family picked me up. They were going home after visiting relatives, the boot stuffed with gifts and olives and god-knows-what from villages along the route. Three kids in the back seat, all elbows and arguments. They fed me pastries, corrected my pronunciation, and insisted on telling me the entire family history of Thrace. At the border the father argued with the guard about paperwork, the mother handed out more pastries, and the kids tried to climb over me to see the soldiers.

And then, just like that, I was in Turkey. The Road to Istanbul. The highways were louder now, more chaotic. Traffic like a living organism. Drivers inventing new lanes, new rules, new geometries of risk. I stood at the roadside for ten minutes before a lorry screeched to a halt and the driver leaned out, waving wildly, shouting “ISTANBUL! ISTANBUL!” as if he’d been waiting specifically for me.

We barrelled westward, the cab rattling like it was held together by optimism and borrowed bolts. The driver sang folk songs, swore at traffic, and at one point produced a melon from under the seat and insisted I eat half of it.

First Sight of the City – And then – there it was. A vast sprawl of light and concrete and history piled on top of history. Istanbul doesn’t appear gradually; it erupts. One moment you’re on a motorway, the next you’re in a civilisation that has swallowed entire empires and still hasn’t finished digesting them.

The skyline hit me first: minarets, cranes, towers, domes. Old and new arguing with each other. The Bosphorus shimmering like a border between worlds.

Finding a Corner to Exist In. I got dropped somewhere central-but-not-quite. Walked uphill, downhill, through markets selling spices and plastic toys and counterfeit jeans. Found a cheap hostel with doors that didn’t quite lock and beds that creaked ominously with every breath.
I dumped my pack, went outside, sat on a low wall, and watched the city breathe. The call to prayer drifted over rooftops. Boats moved like ghosts across the water. People hurried past carrying bags, bread, gossip, whole lives.

I felt like I’d reached the edge of something – the edge of Europe, the edge of the analogue era, before everything got flattened into apps and fenced-in channels.

A Year Long Summer

#Traval #hamishcampbell #easteurope

The Power of Film

The Godfather films, aren’t only stories about criminals, they’re stories about the world we live in: hierarchy pretending to be community, patriarchy pretending to be protection, capitalism pretending to be freedom, politicians pretending to be legitimate, family pretending to be love. It’s the #deathcult mythos in cinematic form.

They’re parables about how hierarchy rots everything it touches. Coppola and Puzo create a world where the mafia isn’t an aberration but a mirror of #mainstreaming power: patriarchal families, capitalist accumulation, politicians in pockets, and a state captured by private interests. It’s #deathcult logic wrapped in myth.

It opens not with the fake glamour of today’s action films, with none of the politically correct obscuring, but with real working people doing real life, it’s a view outside the current post truth polished mess. It’s about what’s behind the shiny surface blindness, you watch this film today to experience filmmaking and politics, like meany older films, the pacing is slow. Our attention spans are broken, good to keep this in your mind as you learn to see anew this ethnography of a pastime.

The Corleones aren’t only monsters from the shadows; they’re the real face of American power with the mask removed. Vito Corleone is an older, more honest version of the #neoliberal billionaire who buys judges today. The story’s “crime families” are stand-ins for competing capitalist blocks. The story is a metaphor for how power protects itself, how legitimacy is a costume, and how the violence of the system, hides behind talk of “family,” “business,” “respect,” and “tradition.”

The first two films critique the world we live in, a family built on the same contradictions that tear it apart. Quotes:

“It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.”
→ the neoliberal worldview: harm without responsibility.

“I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
→ the essence of capitalist coercion: “choice” backed by threat.

“We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.”
→ capitalism’s real goal: monopoly masked as freedom.

“Just when I thought I was out…”
→ no exit from systems built on domination.

The films are showing us the mythology of the mainstreaming #deathcult. America as Mafia, Mafia as America.

The first film opens with a small man being crushed by the system: a father whose daughter is brutalized, and the courts shrug. This is how neoliberalism works: public services are defunded, fail, people are pushed into private “solutions.” Justice outsourced to a Don is no different from healthcare outsourced to a corporation: both sell what should be a right. Vito’s “friendship” is the same as corporate “philanthropy”, a mask over structural violence.

The “family” keeps up appearances – the bourgeoisie’s favourite hobby – while patriarchal rot devours everyone inside. Connie is beaten by Carlo, but the family shrugs because patriarchal norms demand they stay out of a “private matter.” The same system that fetishizes “protecting our women” abandons them whenever protection would inconvenience male hierarchy. It’s about too much control and not enough care.

Competition, crises, violence – the capitalist cycle – it is useful to see the mythology in #KISS terms, the Five Families aren’t criminals; they’re competing capitalist firms. Their war is a stand-in for economic crises. Clemenza even says these things happen “every ten years,” which is basically the capitalist business cycle.

The Tattaglias and Barzinis pushing heroin aren’t “more evil”, they’re the next stage of capitalism’s expansion, accumulation demanding new markets. Violence is “nothing personal,” which is how every predatory corporation sees the world.

Michael, capitalism’s golden child, was meant to be “legitimate” – a senator, a governor. A respectable frontman to maintain the illusion. Instead, he becomes the perfect neoliberal mess: calm, disciplined, efficient, emotionally repressed, willing to destroy anyone to maintain order. He is the patriarchal son weaponized. The obvious patriarchy flowing through the films is a useful reminder for some and insight for meany about what happens behind closed doors in the current hard right with their calling for “family values”.

By the end of the first film, when he wipes out all rivals while standing in a church professing faith, we see the metaphor: authoritarian capitalism, patriarchal religion, and state legitimacy all fused together. He “renounces Satan” while becoming him, the system itself.

Part II, sharpens this critique. We see young Vito’s rise in a world where feudalism is giving way to capitalism, one hierarchy composting into another. He kills Don Fanucci (feudal power) so he can build Genco Olive Oil (capitalist power). Same structure, new branding.

Meanwhile, Michael, the more matured form of this system, expands the empire into Nevada, New York, Miami, Sicily, Cuba. It’s the globalisation arc. And like all global empires, it’s built on betrayal: Fredo’s betrayal (internal collapse), Kay’s rejection (patriarchal fragility exposed), Michael’s violence against his own (self-destruction inherent in all hierarchical systems). By killing Fredo “for the family,” Michael destroys the family. Capitalism works the same way: protecting profit destroys society.

And the ending is the #techcurn lesson: systems built on secrecy, power, and control always collapse inward, devouring the people they claim to protect. Michael Corleone is neoliberalism in human form. Vito is the earlier, “nicer” version of the same system. And the people around them? Compost.

The Cuba revolution is the one moment where the system cracks – the #openweb moment of the film – where people try to reclaim the commons, break the hierarchy, stop being pawns.

On the subject of filmmaking, a lot of the films’ technics now look every day, this is not because they are, they are brilliant, it’s because every film for the last 50 years has coped them and thus diluted their shine with mediacy. Open your eyes, afresh, watch the films, you are seeing the invention of cinema. When you are used to a lifetime of derivative drivel.

The History of visionOntv: What We Built, What We Lost, and Why It Matters Again

Looking back at the old TubeMogul stats – the archived page from 2011 – I had a jolt:
18 million verified views, and when you added the torrent distribution, RSS syndication, video CDROM redistribution, and all the edge-case channels we seeded into, the total was closer to 34 million views. These were big numbers back then.

All grassroots, all #KISS, all built on the early #openweb ethos, that number matters, not for vanity, rather, it showed proof-of-work for what a truly decentralized media network could do before the #dotcons consolidated their grip.

People forget this now, but #visionOntv was one of the earliest real-world demonstrations of the idea behind what we have now with the #Fediverse, years before the word existed:

  • distributed hosting
  • open content flows
  • creative commons
  • no algorithmic manipulation
  • human curation
  • peer-to-peer distribution
  • training and empowerment as core paths

This wasn’t theory, it was practice, in the era just before the enclosure of the Web took hold. The original vision – visionOntv’s mission statement from back then – looking at it now through the Web Archive – still works:

“Are you feeling dejected and bored? Does mainstream media make you feel ill? Then get off your ass…” This wasn’t branding, it was the cultural tone of a time when people still believed the internet could change things, and it genuinely did. visionOntv was a platform, seed for a network, built around a simple idea: video for social change, delivered in formats normal people could actually use.

We were deliberately designing for the “lean-in / lean-out” model before UX people had the words for it. You could sit back and watch it as TV. Or you could click deeper, link up to the grassroots campaigns behind the stories, jump straight into action.

The point was always outreach, always getting beyond the activist bubble, aways trying to plant seeds of agency in ordinary people, that “compost” metaphor we still use today. Quality, not chaos, visionOntv was not open-publishing, we had a quality threshold, we mentored people into producing work that worked, visually, politically, narratively, not gatekeeping, but gardening.

This is something the #openweb forgot: freedom isn’t the same as noise. We were trying to hold onto a craft tradition inside a political one. Tools, Training, and #4opens. We pushed #FOSS open source production tools as far as they could go, but we weren’t dogmatic. If a corporate tool was necessary for outreach, we used it. The guiding star was always:

Does this help media democracy grow?
Does this empower real people?
Does this keep the compost fertile?

And because we distributed everything in Creative Commons non-commercial, people everywhere could download, remix, project in their communities, hand out self copied video CDs to run their own screenings. One broadband connection could feed a whole neighbourhood. That was media democracy. Again: this was proto-Fediverse thinking before the word existed, this was a people’s broadcasting network built on the #4opens.

What happened, the #dotcons consolidated – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter – and sucked the air out of open distribution. We were publishing into a storm of #enshittification before the word was coined. And of course we tried to ride the wave, keep the doors open, keep the channels alive. But the gravity of centralized platforms crushed the ecology, distribution dried up.

The “lean-in/lean-out” mechanism was rendered obsolete by the algorithmic feed. The early #P2P ecosystems were squeezed by copyright paranoia and corporate capture. It wasn’t that visionOntv failed, the Web changed around it, in the same way soil ecology collapses when a monoculture plantation takes over.

The #Peertube Era That… Almost Happened. When the #Fediverse bloomed, we did the obvious thing: we pushed all the video archives, feeds, and channels onto PeerTube. It was the correct move, and we were there early. But PeerTube was young, fragile, underfunded, underhyped. And unlike the massive #dotcons, decentralized tech requires community support to stay alive.

We didn’t get that support, so the server went dark. And now the whole archive – all that history, all that outreach, all the proof-of-work – sits offline. This isn’t a guilt trip, it’s a call-out to the people who care about the #openweb: Come on, folks, let’s bring visionOntv back https://opencollective.com/open-media-network/projects/visionontv

The internet itself isn’t the problem

Let’s be clear: the internet itself isn’t the problem. We knew how to build decentralised, humane, empowering networks long before the #dotcons turned everything into a behavioural extraction machine. The original internet – messy, permissionless, #4opens by default – can’t addict you. It doesn’t care. It doesn’t optimise. It just connects.

What addicts you are, the enclosure layers built on top of the internet. The sticky walls. The velvet handcuffs. The slick, dopamine-juiced engagement loops that the #dotcons built precisely because an open commons is unprofitable to their shareholders.

The tragedy is that we’ve let that thin, commercial crust redefine what people think the internet is. And because people can’t see the difference anymore, they blame “technology” or “the internet” instead of the actual problem, #dotcons corporate capture of communications.

This misframing is not an accident. It’s a political success for Silicon Valley. We do need to call out this #techshit, the compost layer we need to break down and return to the soil, but don’t mistake it for the internet. One is a commons. The other is a shopping mall with mirrors.

And this matters, because if we accept the framing that the entire internet is toxic, addictive, or inherently harmful, we give up the ground needed to fight for a public-first, #openweb future. We surrender the commons to the #dotcons by default. It’s classic #deathcult logic: destroy the shared world, declare it unfixable, then sell the gated alternative.

The #KISS path is still there, just harder to see under the sludge: simple tools, open protocols, people over platforms, and messy, real community instead of “curated engagement.” Things grow in compost. Even #techshit. Especially #techshit.

The task now is helping people tell the difference between the internet and the systems designed to trap them, and then getting them out into the open air again.

A Year-Long Summer (short version)

I spent the summer of 1989 travelling in Ireland. I can’t now remember why Ireland, exactly. The first step was a lift to Barnsley with my parents, helping set up the exhibition 100 Years of Women’s Banners at the City Art Gallery. From there I hitchhiked north through the Lake District, stopping for the night in Keswick. In the morning I headed on to Stranraer, the cheapest route to Ireland, to catch the ferry to Larne, thirty miles north of Belfast.

I arrived in Larne late in the day and hitchhiked along the coastal road, which runs within a few feet of the sea all the way up the North Coast. I stopped for the night in a small village called Cushendall, where two of the three hotels had been blown to bits and the police station looked like an army fortress, bristling with aerials and wrapped in a high anti-rocket fence.

The coast itself is beautiful and unspoilt. According to a local tourist guide who gave me a lift, this was because the IRA had been sabotaging tourism and the economy since the 1970s, anything built was liable to be blown up. “Keeps the place liveable,” he joked darkly. The next day I continued to White Park Bay and the Giant’s Causeway, which was a bit of a disappointment, as famous tourist sites often are. But the cliffs of Benbane Head and the empty sea coast more than made up for it.

Hitchhiking toward Londonderry, I was joined by a friendly Irishman with a very thick accent in Coleraine. We got a lift from an English journalist who drove us round all the local trouble spots, with our Irish companion giving a running commentary: “That’s where Bloody Sunday happened… that’s the statue they blew up… that Post Office has been rebuilt three times…”

We were stopped at a checkpoint on the edge of the Bogside, two soldiers pointing rifles at me, more further back behind a heavy machine gun with their fingers on the trigger. They searched the boot, checked our passports, then waved us through.

Armed soldiers in the streets, convoys of armoured Land Rovers, roadblocks of corrugated iron and rusting barbed wire, concrete fortresses, bomb-damaged buildings covered in republican murals. Razor wire, rubble, neglect everywhere… all of this in what is, underneath, a normal country town: shopping arcades, council estates, grannies with shopping trolleys, mothers with kids in tow. The same as any small English town, but layered with tension and decay.

I crossed the border on foot, past a security bunker and huge concrete bollards, into the Republic of Ireland. I stayed the night in Muff, a small village just over the border, where I was offered a job as a “granny-minder” in the local hostel. She was an interesting woman, she remembered the first trans-Atlantic plane landing next to her cottage, but the repetition of dementia was too much for me.

I hitchhiked across to Donegal town, my first proper glimpse of the west coast, and then right out to the Atlantic. Rugged, deserted. I stayed just outside the small village of Kilcar, visiting the Celtic tombs and monoliths of Glencolumbkille, overlooking a quiet bay and the open ocean. At a tiny independent hostel that also doubled as the village shop, I was welcomed with tea, cake, open friendliness, the smell of a peat fire, and the chatter of a group of Germans.

After an Irish music session at the pub, I wandered down to the beach around midnight. No moon, pitch black, lit only by the stars. Ahead of me I saw what looked like a sack blowing in the wind. As I got closer I heard heavy breathing. The “sack” grew a white face and froze. I stopped dead in surprise. The vague black shape split into two large animals with white stripes across their faces. They stepped toward me, snorting loudly, then turned and bolted across the road, shaking the ground as they ran into an overgrown field. Two badgers, huge ones, materialising out of the dark. Quite a surprise to meet at midnight.

Down at the beach I saw phosphorescent waves for the first time, sparkling blue specks of light with each retreating wave. I would see this often later, from the bow and wake of the boat crossing the ocean.

I spent days exploring the empty landscape, getting lifts from peat cutters on lonely moors and locals who would stop even when I wasn’t hitchhiking. Children by cottages would stare with wide-eyed curiosity before giving directions with shy smiles beneath mops of curly brown hair.

Hitchhiked round to Sligo, arriving at midday with a strange feeling. After the magical tranquillity and emptiness of Donegal, it felt like I’d stumbled into sin city rather than a quiet Irish university town. Took the inland road to Galway, no memories of that stretch, and stayed a few days. A fantastic thunderstorm rolled into the bay: lashing rain, lightning cracking across the sky. I stood at the end of the pier with electricity skittering along the power cables overhead, total calm in the harbour below. Swans drifting, cormorants diving for fish. BOOM… CRASH… buckets of water pouring from black, tumbling clouds racing out to sea. Then silence: crystal air, a newly washed world.

Met Alic hitchhiking out of Galway. He showed me around Oranmore Castle. We sat drinking tea, talking about dolphins. He invited me back later that summer, I thought, maybe? From Oranmore to Kinvara, on the edge of the Burren, where I stayed in a deserted hostel. The next day I followed the coast to the Cliffs of Moughan, a blighted tourist spot if ever one existed. Then inland to Ennis and back toward the coast to catch the car ferry over the Shannon, stopping the night in a tiny village on the far side.

Down to Tralee and around the Ring of Kerry, high mountains, deep glens, pure white beaches, translucent blue sea. It felt more like a tropical paradise than the Western Atlantic, but I had neither time nor inclination to stop. Passed through Skibbereen to Baltimore, a small harbour village right at the southwest tip. Stayed a few days in a tidy, well-run German hostel by the sea. Went swimming in tidal pools and managed to slice my foot open badly, lots of blood, but only superficial. The water was so cold I didn’t notice until my plimsolls began squelching on the walk back.

To Cork next. While looking around the university in the evening I met some Americans who arrived back at the hostel at 2am carrying a bottle of mead and a trout they’d been gifted by a friendly fisherman in a pub. Shallow-fried trout, soda bread and mead at 3 in the morning with American stock-brokers, why not? The next day, a lively free rock concert by the River.

Hitchhiked to Rosslare via Waterford, which was pretty dull. Took the ferry to Fishguard and drifted around Wales, London, and Ollerton for a bit. Then back to Galway to take up Alic’s offer: coach from London, special deal via Holyhead and Dublin.

I stayed at Oranmore Castle, a tall, square, blocky stone tower overlooking Galway Bay, two great halls, heaps of bedrooms, dank corridors. Deserted except for the occasional visitor and me, haunting the place for the summer of ’89. Crab catching on the old stone pier, the Galway Races, helicopters overhead, champagne parties in the great hall, an art gallery under construction.

Travelled through Connemara, visited Achill Island, windswept like the Falklands, dolphins jumping close to shore. At the most westerly car park in Europe, I impressed the locals by building a church out of sand, complete with graveyard. From Oranmore I explored the Burren: grey limestone hills full of rare plants, Celtic ruins, Christian ruins, guided tours round deep caves, not really my thing.

By the end of summer the weather closed in, dark, damp. I took my leave of Alic and Leone, packed my bag, and skipped off down the road with my thumb in the air. Got a lift, for the second time, from a slightly camp gay vicar. A couple of interesting propositions and discussions later he dropped me in Athlone. From there to Dublin, where I stayed a few days before heading back to Wales.

Winter in Britain didn’t appeal. So… Mediterranean? Africa? West Indies? Anywhere south.

Europe, heading downwards. From London to Paris by train. Arrived early, dumped my bag in a locker, wandered: the Seine, the Louvre, the Pompidou, Sacré-Cœur. Slept on the roof of a multi-storey car park near Gare du Nord because my friend’s flat was full of guests. Lack of planning has its disadvantages. Walked past the security cameras as if I owned the place, climbed to the top. From the roof of the service building I watched the Eiffel Tower sparkle and Paris breathe beneath me. Very safe, police patrols cruising by every few hours. I just sat and peered down at them. Weather was beautiful so I stayed two nights.

Left Paris to hitch to Bordeaux, hoping to pick grapes, but I’d missed the harvest due to the dry summer. Hitched to Biarritz with a New Zealander. Midnight picnic in a pine forest under a full moon: sticky fruit, wine, French bread, scents of warm resin and singing crickets. Biarritz is a strange mix of Victorian Englishness and southern French style, broad beaches, rolling Atlantic surf, Australians skipping across waves on boards, watched by bronzed models.

From Biarritz I hitched alone in an English lorry to Lisbon, a day and a half across the endless Spanish plains, the scenery only changing with the next flock of mangy sheep or the next church spire. Slept in a warm, aromatic haystack.

No luck finding a boat in Lisbon. Stayed ten days, checked docks and tourist sites. Polluted, unfriendly. Took an overnight train to the Algarve with some friends and a stunningly loud peasant brass band. Wandered to the Atlantic coast near Cape Vincent, wild, beautiful, white-sand coves scented with herbs. Ate figs from the trees, swam in surf, lay on beaches. Stayed a week in a smelly old fort perched on a headland, cliffs dropping sheer into the sea. Watched lazy fish outsmart fishermen casting nets from tiny boats far below.

Hitched to Seville by a patchwork of thumb, bus, train, and finally a battered Israeli VW camper van that broke down at the outskirts. Walked through boulevards lined with heavy orange trees into the old centre. Met a Guatemalan woman who helped us find a hotel. The remains of Moorish architecture: cool, calm, civilised. Got swept into a film shoot in the old quarter, carnival scenes, dry ice, masks, prancing, flying capes.

Bussed and hitched to Gibraltar. Rain, overcast, nowhere to stay. Almost arrested for inhabiting an abandoned military bunker, saved only because the police got stuck behind a car crash. After a week of asking around the marina, I found the Danish yacht Nana, a 42′ steel ketch heading for the Canaries and possibly the West Indies. Left the next day.

Sailing across the Atlantic on Nana was… something else. Left Las Palmas with Ivor the skipper and Dagmar as deckhand. The last sight of Europe was Cape St. Vincent, where three weeks earlier I’d been sunning myself in a secluded rocky cove. We skirted the coast of Morocco cautiously, staying out of sight of land to avoid pirates. Then nothing but blue, sometimes grey, waves stretching in all directions.

Climbed to the top of the mast on a calm day, fell out of bed and cut my head open on a not-so-calm night. Nine days later we arrived in Las Palmas, Grand Canary. Sailing… what a crazy thing to do! “Cooking in a galley with a swaying stove, pots and pans flying everywhere… sauces slurping, water boiling… falling forward, falling back, what a mad idea!”

Two weeks in the marina, sleeping in a hammock swinging from the mast, making do with the peculiar charm of Las Palmas: giant cockroachs, oil slicks in the harbour, the odd beach barbecue with exploding flambé. Explored the hills and mountains by hired car, swam in a mountain lake, skinny-dipped in cold, fresh water, the sun warm, pine needles soft underfoot. Friends from the marina, hopefuls and dreamers, looked for boats.

We motored east to Tenerife, waiting for the right weather. A storm damaged the docked boats: the Nana was crushed against the quay by a Brazilian mahogany schooner, the anchor motor shattered, ropes broken, railings scratched. I spent most of the night scouring the island for discarded tires to act as fenders, the waves tossing the boat like a tiny elevator, ropes straining, snapping with bangs. Five other boats were wrecked in the two weeks, running aground or slipping anchors.

While working along cliffs east of Los Cristianos, I spotted a sail flapping on the rocks, the English yacht Yarmouth. Hurrying down luckily, nobody was trapped. Spanish Red Cross shrugged; they didn’t seem to care. When our gear box fell off while manoeuvring in the harbour mouth, the Dutch rescued us just in time. Two weeks of inactivity, swinging from the boom, playing guitars with Dagmar in the cockpit to pass the night, getting sunburnt, cooking in salty water, this became our strange rhythm.

Finally, we set off. Motoring out at dusk with a leak in the oven, a sudden decision, there was no wind but a weather fax suggested wind 200 miles down the line, and the storm might close in behind us.

Atlantic Crossing. Days of calm, then the trade winds finally picked up. Dolphins escorted us, whales breeched in the distance, flying fish arced over the deck. Surfing down waves at night, the boat lifted by thirty-foot swells, stern first, before being carried down the other side. Shooting stars streaked across the sky every ten minutes. One massive thunderstorm blackened the sky on the port side for an entire day. Other sailing boats were tiny lights against the horizon; lone sailors, obviously asleep, continued their course. Even a tanker had to be dodged, they had a terrible turning circle and would not stop.

On becalmed days, we swam. No land for a thousand miles, three miles deep beneath us. Overboard dives from the emergency box, careful of sharks. Every few days dolphins swarmed the bow, leaping, skimming, glinting in rainbow hues under the sun. The days were the same, sun-warmed bucket showers, peeling potatoes in salty water, washing clothes in salty water, everything salted, everything alive. The smell of the boat: plastic, fabric, wood, damp sea smell, sun blazing overhead.

After the 25-day crossing, Christmas Eve brought Barbados. The trees appeared bright- colerd off the starboard bow, a small brightly-painted fishing boat bobbing between the troughs. Anchored in a bay among other yachts, we motored into port to register with customs and immigration.

The West Indies were touristy but friendly. Stayed for Christmas and New Year in a cheap room behind a beach bar in Bridgetown. Shared it with a friend: one of us paid, the other hid under the bed at knocks on the door. Swam twice daily, got drunk on free rum at parties, travelled the island by bus, slept on a deserted beach for a night, climbed a swaying coconut palm for fresh milk, ripping the bottom out of my only spare trousers in the process. Bus rides back to Bridgetown drew strange looks: the only white person on board with a massive hole in the back of my trousers and no underpants. Had to smile.

No safe passage by boat appeared for onward travel, so I imposed on a friend from Las Palmas, Andrew, to take me to Granada in a 31’ English boat called Emma, participating in the ARC race to raise money for disabled sailors on tall ships. Incredibly seasick all the way, but Granada, tropical jungle overgrown with wood and corrugated iron houses, abundant fruits, flowers, and exotic birds, was worth every heave. Hitchhiked through mountains to the lake at the top, over the island, through banana plantations, nutmeg trees, dense jungle, a place both beautiful and strange.

Eventually, I found Nana anchored again in St. George’s harbour. Reunited with Dagmar and Nils. The Caribbean was stunning, but dull and expensive. Bought a flight ticket to London, with a stopover in Miami.

Florida, Orange Groves, and the American South. Landing in Miami, I was immediately struck by the emptiness, a soul-less vacuum of blacks and poverty-stricken whites. Found another Englishman, Berny, in the hostel. Hired a car and drove north to Orlando in search of orange-picking work. Frost had devastated the harvest; no luck this far up. Found another Englishman, Andy, and together the three of us decided to head south where the frost had been less severe.

Hitchhiked back to Avon Park. Met up in the library, shared a motel room, cooking on a camping stove in the middle of the floor. Next day, orange-picking under a Mexican boss in the grove, ten hours, earned $4 after deductions, argued with the Mexicans about tax and work permits, and that was the end of that work.

We splashed out on our meagre earnings at the beach, hoping for carpentry work, hitchhiking to Fort Pierce. We crashed on the flat roof of an abandoned gas station by the beach, mosquitoes, alligators, minor worries. Then, by chance, we were invited to stay for two weeks with a college family in Wotchuler: Disney World, affluent conservative American life, sunshine, absurdly clean streets. Back to Orlando, trying to find a way to California. Almost gave up before hiring a car.

Cross-Country Chaos. Drove a hire car to New Orleans with two girls from South Wales, me, Berny, and Andy. Stopped by police, $164 speeding fine for 70 in a 55 mph zone. Didn’t pay. Zooming out of the state, we drove through the desert, sleeping in a rolled-up sleeping bag, stopping once in a motel, the stars intense above us. Camped on the Rio Grande, scorpion as dinner companion, Navajo reservation in the middle of rocky scrub desert. Denver, crash in a car park, Indian cave dwellings, Painted Desert, Monument Valley — over the Rocky Mountains, across the Midwest, small-town America in all its exhausted glory.

Sat on a rusting iron girder bridge over a river, beavers playing, an overgrown railway nearby. The endless nights of small roads lit only by headlights, dark pubs, dead-eyed Americans, a bleak, fascinating wilderness.

New York City. Arrived New York next day. After dropping the hire car in Mount Kisko, me and Berny hitchhiked with a crazy guy in a giant American sports car doing 90 mph, weaving through traffic, squealing round stoplights, eventually dumped in the Bronx. Subway, chaos, flashing lights, sirens, smells. Stayed just over a week: Central Park, Manhattan, Empire State, Staten Island ferry, Statue of Liberty, Greenwich Village, Chinatown, a city alive and alinating.

Climbed rooftops for a better view, almost arrested as a terrorist at JFK for exploring too freely. Flight to London: six boring hours, a dull contrast to the wildness of America.

Back to England. Civilized at first glance, small, homely. But the impression wears off quickly. Hitchhiked to Wales over a day and a half, missed an arranged lift with my mother from Greenham Common Peace Camp. Had to hitch 250 miles by six in the evening, finally stopping past Carmarthen in a friendly pub. Signed on the dole in Aberystwyth, May 25th, 1990, nothing had changed.

Ireland, Oranmore Castle, Full Circle. Finally, back to Ireland, Oranmore Castle, completing the circle I had started over a year earlier. Stayed three weeks in time for Bill King’s 80th birthday party. Then back to Wales, onward to a job in London. Winter in Britain, not an appealing idea.

What next? Japan? South America? Who knows. The horizon always calls.

Long version https://hamishcampbell.com/a-year-long-summer/

#Traval #hamishcampbell

Leadership in the Era of Quantum and AI – A Reaction

This lecture was framed as leadership in a time of economic, social, and environmental crisis. In reality, it was a performance, a ritual reaffirmation of the system that generated those crises. A talk about “leadership” steeped in the language of inevitability, technological salvation, and corporate myth-making.

The speaker, Muhtar Kent – Coca-Cola executive, delivered a brand sermon for the young acolytes of the #deathcult. Unconsciously or not, he was selling the two current hype bubbles: Quantum and AI. Both framed as paradigm shifts. But the problem with this mythology is that both are, right now, more fantasy than function.

#AI has no intelligence. None. It produces plausible text and performs statistical pattern recognition. That’s it. The current explosion of PR and funding is about destroying value, not creating it, replacing labour, creativity, and human meaning with cheap automated exhaust.

#Quantum computing, at present, has about the power of a 1990s scientific calculator at best. Much of the PR is built on pre-calculated solutions dressed up as magical quantum speed. It’s fudging. It’s lying. And yet, like AI, billions flow into the hype.

Leadership, with no connection to reality, this worship core message was simple: Leadership is a promise, and a brand is a promise kept, his talk had neither of these. A normal mess, a distillation of the managerial worldview; reality flattened into branding. Leadership becomes not action, not accountability, not ethics, but worship, corporate devotion, a smooth surface projected onto a burning world

The Q&A: Was a closed circle, the questions that followed were trapped inside the same narrow, pointless frame.

Q: How do we restore trust in institutions and politics?
A: Politics is a “bad brand”. The solution, apparently, is to partner with subnational actors, mayors, governors, etc. He avoids the structural crisis entirely and reframes it as a marketing problem.

Q: Does AI in Coca-Cola advertising create value or destroy it?
A: He claims it’s just applying old ideas with new tools. Again, pure branding logic.

The was more… the audience, wannabe future leaders of the global managerial class, were sycophantic, unquestioning, hungry for status. Every question was asked from inside the bubble. No challenge. No structural critique. No awareness of the real crises unfolding around us. The Audience were not people seeking truth or grappling with this crisis, they were worshippers looking for careers and job validation. Small sharks circling a bigger shark, hoping to learn how to swim with sharper teeth.

Conclusion:

Not leadership – worship.
Not intelligence – PR.
Not value creation – value destruction.

And the people in the room were not thinking their way out of the mess. They were rehearsing how to reproduce it as their path.

#Oxford

What has changed in leadership, which principles endure, and how do we respond?

The glossy rhetoric around “Quantum and AI leadership” makes it sound as if we’ve entered a new epoch where the old rules no longer hold. But strip away the hype and you find something familiar: the same elitist managerial class, still addicted to control, still mistaking centralization for competence, and still refusing to learn from the last 40 years of crisis.

What has changed is the scale and velocity of the mess they are creating. We’ve built systems we no longer understand, infrastructures too brittle to trust, and economies so captured by the #deathcult of neoliberalism that even existential threats – climate collapse, inequality, runaway tech – are treated as branding opportunities rather than calls for transformation. Leadership, as sold in these events, is a performance.

The tragedy is that the institutions talking loudest about “leading in the AI age” are the same ones least capable of doing so. They fear uncertainty, fear decentralization, fear the public. So they cling to control, and in doing so accelerate the crisis they claim to be solving.

Quantum and AI aren’t the challenge. The challenge is whether we allow the same narrow, extractive logic to shape the next era, or whether we root ourselves again in trust, openness, and the radical idea that people, not systems, are what matter.

Oxford radical history

The scent of damp soil and half-forgotten futures, a version that flow, a sourcebook for day-to-day life and activism from a time when the local living alternatives were not theory but everyday life, in a small English town https://oxford.indymedia.org.uk/ It’s an archive now, a time capsule you can wander through. If this current generation is looking for inspiration, I’d suggest starting at the beginning, the last few years of the site weren’t exactly its golden hour.

When I went back recently and found this page, I stumbled across two posts from my younger self, still humming with the raw, chaotic energy of those years. A small echo across time.

Oxford #Indymedia is a local example of how utopian and dystopian currents flow, how hope and burnout danced around each other like quarrelling siblings. It shows how people lived alternatives rather than only theorising, how the #openweb wasn’t a dream but a sweaty, meeting-filled, joyful, improvisational practice. If you want to dig deeper into the era, my own site is here: https://hamishcampbell.com

And for the moving images, the pixelated documents of that strange, fertile period, go rummaging in what remains of these vaults. Sort by oldest to get the proper archaeology:

There’s a lot there, though less from Oxford, mostly happened pre #dotcons, where you can’t find videos. The compost, the mistakes, the stubborn courage, the feeling that another world wasn’t just possible but already partially assembled in basements, squats, boats, and borrowed offices.

Maybe someone will pick up a thread and weave something fresh with it. That’s the hope.

https://unite.openworlds.info/indymedia/indymedia-reboot

“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 every other possibility. “We, we, we,” they say – but who chooses the “we”? Meanwhile, the parasite class in tech has spent twenty years destroying the social fabric of the internet, turning everything into grift, extraction, and precarious dependence. There is every chance that this new wave of #AI/#NGO/#dotcons fusion will be just more mess for us to compost.

As I said, let’s look at these people who are in bed with the #dotcons, sucking at the teat (LINK) of the #nastyfew. It should be easy to see, at best they’re a warm blanket, precisely when we need a shovel. They always smother real change and real challenge while claiming to “scale impact.” and other buzzwords.

Working within the system and working outside it both have effects – and yes, we need to balance these paths. But let’s be honest: the “inside” path is 98% parasites, and the “outside” path is full of fashionistas hiding insider routes behind radical posturing. So the balance point isn’t where we think it is. It has to be pushed far, far back from the centre we’ve been trained to accept.

Yes, there is some value in their affective progressive-tech narratives, but it is a tiny force against the power of global capital. They love the idea of the “bridging node,” the mythical middle ground where nothing is actually bridged and nothing is actually changed. Soft, persuasive, endlessly consulting, the #NGO path is a warm blanket to snugal when you should be getting up to work. It comforts, it reassures, and it is collectively ineffective. In the end, that blanket is all they have to offer: a feeling, not a transformation.

And then there’s all the #AI, most of it #techshit witch we need to be clear, is not intelligence, just more civic control in the hands of the #nastyfew. LLMs, image recognition, all of it: tools with some utility, but zero real intelligence. What they do enable is more vertical power, refined manipulation, more subtle control, more extraction of attention, behaviour, and labour through the constantly spreading #dotcons.

With our ongoing #openweb reboot we need a real democratic steering wheel again, actual power to change, not ONLY warm blankets and #PR funding. This is why the #OMN, the #4opens, and the slow work of composting matter. Because every other path on offer right now leads straight back to the same smothering, stagnant centre – the place where nothing grows.

#OMN

The Voyage of the Volga: The Wager

INT. THE OXFORD UNION – EVENING

A worn wooden interior lined with old photos and leather books. The clock above the bar ticks with naval precision. A few posh students sip pints and argue about lectures. Rain patters against the windows.

PRESENT:

HAMISH CAMPBELL, calm, steady, with a glint of wild vision behind measured words.

STUART, a skeptical undergraduate engineer.

RALPH, an economic prof who’s seen too much red tape.

FLANAGAN, a wannabe cryptocurrency trader with a cynical grin.

SULLIVAN, a journalist looking for a story.

DAN, a scruffy but sharp mechanic, quietly nursing a mug of tea.

STUART
(holding up a chart)
Hamish, you’ve lost it this time. You can’t sail to Iran on an inland route. Europe isn’t a bathtub, you know.

HAMISH
(flatly)
You can, if you know the canals. London to the Baltic Sea, then down the Volga—across to the Caspian. From there, it’s a short hop to Iran.

FLANAGAN
(snickers)
That’s not a voyage, that’s a labyrinth. Half those waterways are closed, half forgotten.

RALPH
And the tugboat? You’re taking that scruffy old thing—what’s it called?

HAMISH
(smiles faintly)
The Volga.

SULLIVAN
You named the boat after the river you’re trying to conquer. Poetic—but absurd.

HAMISH
It’s not absurd. The inland waterways are the old arteries of Europe. We’ve just forgotten how to use them.

STUART
You really think you can make it all the way to Iran by river and canal?

HAMISH
Yes. And I’ll prove it.

A silence falls. Rain grows heavier against the windows.

FLANAGAN
Prove it how? A blog post? A film? Another myth for your #openweb friends?

HAMISH
(smiling thinly)
A patron campaign.

STUART
A wager? What are we betting on?

HAMISH
That I can make the voyage. No flashy corporate sponsorship. No closed tech. Just the tugboat Volga, open charts, and Dan here.

Dan looks up, startled, tea half-spilled.

DAN
Wait—me?

HAMISH
You said you wanted a break from working life. This is it.

SULLIVAN
You’re both mad. I’ll sign up for the Patreon—what—five hundred pounds says you won’t get past the Keal canal.

FLANAGAN
Make it a thousand to reach the Helsinki.

STUART
(laughing)
And ten thousand if you actually touch Iranian soil!

Hamish calmly pulls a slim laptop from his backpack and slides it across the table.

HAMISH
Let’s make the pledges official.

They type, close the laptop, and stands, buttoning his jacket.

HAMISH (CONT’D)
The river doesn’t care about politics or doubt. It just flows. All we have to do is follow it.

He checks the clock — 8:45 p.m.

HAMISH (CONT’D)
Come on, Dan. The tide’s waiting in London. Time to move.

EXT. IFFLEY LOCK – NIGHT

The tugboat Volga rocks gently under the amber glow of the Isis Farmhouse lights. Ducks gather along the bank. Rain glistens on the solar panels. Dan loads supplies while Hamish inspects the digital charts.

DAN
You really think this old tub can make it to Iran?

HAMISH
If it can float, it can travel. Trust the river, not the chattering #dotcons online.

He starts the engine. The tug hums to life.

HAMISH
Next stop—the North Sea. Then the world’s forgotten backwaters.

They push off into the mist as Oxford recedes behind them, the city lights reflecting faintly on the black water.

FADE OUT.

TITLE CARD:
“The Voyage of the Volga has begun.”

#boatingeurope

The #OMN Path: Openness as Revolution

This is about revolution as regeneration, not only destruction. In an era built on tech dependency, revolution isn’t only about smashing the machines, it’s about liberating them. Turning tools back into commons, not commodities. It’s composting the toxic monoculture of the #dotcons into fertile ground for the #openweb to grow again. Revolution means reclaiming agency, not blindly rejecting technology, but re-rooting it into light, human-scale, transparent, and accountable relationships.

The #openweb as infrastructure for freedom, isn’t just a technical architecture, it’s a social contract. Revolution means re-establishing that contract through the #4opens. When we build networks this way, we decentralize power, not just servers. The #KISS act of publishing, federating, and remixing information freely is itself revolutionary in a world where everything is locked behind paywalls and algorithms.

Tech as commons, not commodity, We’ve learned that “innovation” under capitalism means enclosure and surveillance. Revolution in this context looks like refusal of extraction: creating cooperative infrastructures that are not driven by profit but by maintenance, care, and shared use. Think of community built #p2p mesh networks, open hardware, peer-to-peer storage, and federated #ActivityPub publishing as revolutionary paths – not add-ons, but foundations.

Cultural and cognitive shifts, shifting the cultural narrative from “user” to participant. From “consumer” to custodian. The real struggle is against the #deathcult of endless growth and the #geekproblem of technocratic detachment. It’s about re-learning how to think together, rebuilding trust, and balancing the #fluffy (care, empathy, collaboration) and the #spiky (truth, resistance, boundaries).

Direct action in the digital today looks like:

  • Practicing digital mutual aid – sharing skills, hosting, dev, and care.
  • Bridging online and offline organising, connecting digital tools to local struggles for housing, food, land, and rights etc.

Above all, any real revolutionary network – like the #OMN – has to strip away the old skins of power. No hierarchies. No hidden structures. No property games. No fetishizing of tools, status, or “official” etiquette.

If we’re building something new, we can’t carry the unconshuse ghosts of the old world with us. That means not just saying we’re open, but being #4opens. Open in decisions, and open in how decisions are made. Transparent in process, not just in outcome. Coherent theory is practice, and practice is theory.

Everyday life has to reflect the world we want to grow. That means composting the commodity mindset, no trading social trust for personal gain. It means building through shared assemblies, through community, through small and self-directing circles that stay alive to change and challenge.

The structure of the #OMN should always be simple, transparent, and direct, so that anyone can walk in, understand it, and shape it. No special knowledge required, no gatekeeping. Thousands of “unprepared” people able to join, act, and make it their own. That’s what #4opens means, a living culture of clarity and participation.

Only when a movement reflects the decentralized, self-organizing community it wants to bring into being can it avoid becoming another elitist shell, another bureaucracy pretending to be radical.

When the #OMN does its work right, it doesn’t stand above the revolution, it dissolves into it, like a thread into a healing wound, leaving behind not an organization, but a living network.

That’s the path: community, openness, trust, and the messy joy of self-organization.

The Mess is Boiling

We’re in a mess, our worship of the #deathcult has driven emissions to another record: the world’s CO₂ levels jumped by 3.5 parts per million from 2023 to 2024 the largest single-year increase on record. Our decision to leave the #nastyfew in charge – our short-sightedness and worship of greed – has pushed the planet beyond the stable ecosystem that supported human life. We have done this for nothing, only for big numbers to go up, for nothing. The one planet we know that can support life is being burnt to a crisp for nothing.

There are two reasons. First: we’re still burning, still digging, still feeding the growth obsession. Emissions are rising – the curve is bending, but not nearly fast enough. Second: the planet’s natural buffers – forests, wetlands, oceans – are weakening. The carbon sinks are choking: less CO₂ is being absorbed and more remains suspended in the atmosphere.

The math is brutal and simple: more in, less out. The atmosphere fills faster; the climate accelerates. This isn’t a surprise – scientists warned us for decades – but the facts are stark: we’ve locked in more than 1.5°C of warming. The UN has said it plainly. In the UK, the Climate Change Committee told the government to start planning for a +2°C world. That’s not a prediction, it’s a plan for failure.

If we want credibility beyond our grassroots #DIY bubble to change and challenge a wider #mainstreaming audience, we must call out both corruption and profiteering within the so-called eco industry as well as celebrate any genuine innovation. Otherwise, billions are spent on initiatives that inflate costs while ‘eco leaders’ jet around in privilege and luxury. Tens of millions in the West are angry about this corruption and injustice. But the effect is negative, that anger is feeding a hard shift to the right which will #block any meaningful progress toward sustainability.

The problem isn’t that we don’t know what to do. The solutions exist and are already working in many places, but we’re not scaling them quickly enough. Renewables are expanding, but too slowly. Deforestation is slowing, but not enough to save the canopy. Methane-detection and fixes are finally being reported more widely – responses have risen from around 1% to 12% – but that’s still negligible compared with what’s required.

The story of the living world since 1970 is one of catastrophic loss: roughly 73% of wildlife populations wiped out. The curve may flatten slightly at the end, but only after the living world has been gutted. That’s not balance, that’s exhaustion.

The catastrophe we are facing is because of a tiny number of powerful actors and their enablers, pushed past tipping points in multiple systems. Warm-water corals have crossed thresholds: the ocean is too hot for recovery in many regions; collapse is now locked in. The Amazon risks drying into Savannah. Ice sheets are destabilising. Methane is beginning to be released from thawing tundra. We’ve crossed a red line.

Meanwhile, political theatre keeps serving up delays and rollbacks. A global carbon tax for shipping was scuppered by hardline actors; the Net Zero Banking Alliance collapsed under pressure. While leaders squabble, the Atlantic produced one of its strongest-ever storms for this time of year – Hurricane Melissa – supercharged by waters heated by our pollution.

For anyone paying attention, recent months have been the worst climate months on record, not only in numbers but in meaning. We’ve forced the planet into feedback loops. Scientists warned this would happen; watching it unfolds brings a new grief.

Yet despair is not a plan. The #deathcult wants us paralysed, to claim “it’s too late.” But this isn’t binary. A planet at 1.5°C is bad; at 2°C it’s worse; at 3°C it’s catastrophic. Every fraction of a degree matters. Most projections today point to a 2.5–3.0°C increase by century’s end under optimistic political assumptions. A more realistic projection, accounting for slower, fragmented action, could be 3.0–3.5°C by 2100.

From a #spiky perspective: Western electorates are increasingly choosing far-right, climate-denying parties. Growth is capitalism’s lifeblood, but it’s death for the environment. Leaving decisions that affect society to a tiny, profit-driven minority is morally unacceptable. This isn’t a technological problem we lack the tools to solve – we have the tools. Instead, a relatively tiny number of selfish actors and their fear and greed are blocking meaningful change.

From a #fluffy perspective: Individuals, billions of us, can act. Start with these everyday steps:

Eat a plant-based diet instead of meat and dairy.

Use public transport, cycling and trains instead of cars.

Buy less; choose used over new whenever possible.

Insulate homes and reduce energy consumption.

Support and use renewable energy: solar and wind.

We can’t walk away from this, the only option is challenge. Reconciling this fluffy and spiky debates is the hardest part: we must act without illusions. We may never “win” in a clean, final sense, but our actions still matter. The difference between 2°C and 3°C will cost billions of lives. The difference between despair and defiance is the grassroots #DIY future we need to seed and grow.

From the spiky side, some argue for direct action: break laws that protect destructive industries, sabotage systems that perpetuate ecological harm, or withdraw labour to halt the economy. These are radical proposals with profound ethical and practical consequences.

From the fluffy side: consider moderating those impulses. Channel energy into mass organising, nonviolent direct action, community resilience, and building alternatives that scale. We need both defiance and construction: refuse what destroys us and build what sustains us. That is how we turn grief into resolve. From the fluffy side, maybe mediate your blocking of this needed spiky path?