Lmst

Privacy in the age of #Dotcons

Let’s be honest, we already lost metadata privacy. The #dotcons, the surveillance state, and the data brokers see everything. This isn’t a warning about what might happen, it’s the reality we live in today's mess. In normal peoples lives every click, every message, every connection is tracked, logged, and monetised. There is no going back to the sealed, closed-off privacy of a pre-digital era. Not legally, not technically. The dream of private digital spaces was always fragile, and […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/privacy-in-the-age-of-the-dotcons/

Now this is an #interestingReads

'One of Gerbner’s most striking findings was that heavy television viewers overwhelmingly identified as “middle-class,” regardless of income or occupation. Media consistently portrays middle-class life as universal, desirable, and normative, while obscuring class antagonism altogether. '

#communication #CultivationTheory #Mainstreaming #authoritarianism #Gerbner #middleclass

https://justaskinquestchins.substack.com/p/from-language-to-screens-using-communication

There is no intelligence in AI – and no path to any

Despite the constant #mainstreaming hype, the branding, and the trillions of dollars being poured into it, there is a simple reality that needs to be stated plainly: There is no intelligence in current “AI”, and there is no working path from today’s Large Language Models (#LLM) and Machine Learning (#ML) systems to anything resembling real, general intelligence. What we are living through is not an intelligence revolution, it is a bubble - one we’ve seen many times before. The […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/there-is-no-intelligence-in-ai-and-no-path-to-any/

Interesting listen: a conversation of @ayoub and @aurelmondon.bsky.social on the mainstreaming of the far right:

The Far Right is Not Inevitable
https://fromtheperiphery.com/2024/07/05/163-the-far-right-is-not-inevitable-w-aurelien-mondon/

#media #MainStreaming #FarRight #politics #liberalism #fascism #WWII #FromThePerifery #EUpol #UKpol

While fear may dominate #mainstreaming politics in the short term, there remains a potential for collective action and progressive change. Historically, #mainstreaming politics has a tendency to shift to the right during times of crisis https://hamishcampbell.com/historically-mainstream-politics-has-exhibited-a-tendency-to-shift-towards-the-right-during-times-of-crisis/

Liberalism, speech, and why Gaza matters

In the current #mainstreaming mess, liberalism – like its phonetically similar cousin libertarianism – isn’t a coherent political philosophy. It’s a bundle of aesthetics and vibes that a professional class has used as a moral identity. A sacred story: free expression, a “marketplace of ideas,” rational debate gently shepherding society toward progress. In theory, in practice, it’s bullshit – and what happened around Gaza exposed this brutally clearly. For the last few hundred […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/liberalism-speech-and-why-gaza-matters/

How do you understand a conservative worldview?

The culture of hopelessness is a deeply conservative reaction to social change and challenge. It is marked by reflexive opposition and inward-looking tribalism, rather than by hope, solidarity, or progress. Instead of imagining alternatives, it retreats into irony and disengagement. Meme culture and pervasive sarcasm are good examples of this tendency. They often reinforce a narrow, consumerist worldview that feels clever but lacks the power to engage with or transform wider social […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/how-do-you-understand-a-conservative-worldview/

Mainstreaming: Piracy is a symptom, not a crime

From a #mainstreaming point of view, what people call “piracy” is not a simple moral failure, it’s rather a signal of systemic #dotcons failure. Again and again, across decades, people have shown a simple truth: When access is fair, affordable, and humane, people pay. When systems become extractive, people route around them. This is not new, not edgy, it’s basic social behaviour. Before the Internet: we had Informal commons, cassette copying, vinyl bootlegs, tape trading networks, […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/mainstreaming-piracy-is-a-symptom-not-a-crime/

We need to stop worshipping a #deathcult

A path to do this is to step away from the #mainstreming mess. In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. The prize recognised their work on how institutions shape prosperity, most famously through their book Why Nations Fail. The timing matters, it matters a lot. This award lands at exactly the moment we should be asking why Institutional Economics - the respectable face of #mainstreaming - has spent the last fifteen years […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/we-need-to-stop-worshipping-a-deathcult/

So the real question for our #mainstreaming culture is simple: does this system produce harm through deliberate collective action? We live in a #deathcult, what is blocking people seeing this? https://hamishcampbell.com/we-live-in-a-deathcult-what-is-blocking-people-seeing-this/

We live in a deathcult, what is blocking people seeing this?

In our worship of the #deathcult, if you strip away the robes, chants, and charismatic leaders, what remains is behaviour, not belief. A destructive cult is not defined by how strange it sounds, but by what it does to bodies, lives, and futures. This matters because it breaks a common illusion: cults are judged by outcomes, not vibes. So the real question for our #mainstreaming culture is simple: does this system produce harm through deliberate collective action? If the answer is yes, then […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/we-live-in-a-deathcult-what-is-blocking-people-seeing-this/

Added a #mainstreaming video to this post - Loot, not legitimacy https://hamishcampbell.com/venezuela-loot-not-legitimacy/

Change and challenge

Let’s be honest about something we usually skate around. Many of our #fluffy activist friends are not fighting for change. They are fighting for equality of access to the existing system. That system is the #deathcult - growth, extraction, hierarchy, control - and most progressive mainstream activism is about making that worship fairer, nicer, more inclusive. More seats in the temple, better language on the altar, safer rituals for those already kneeling. This is not transformation, it is […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/we-need-change-and-challange/

Open Media Network, a path we forgot

The #OMN is not trying to invent the future, it’s trying to restart a social path people forgot they had. That path was never clean, it never asked permission, it never felt safe. But it was real, and that’s the only soil movements have ever grown in. Why this has to happen now? Because the ground we’re standing on is collapsing. The #dotcons are rotting - hollowed out into surveillance, manipulation, and rent extraction. Journalism has collapsed into PR cycles, outrage farming, and […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/open-media-network-a-path-we-forgot-we-had/

Venezuela – Loot, not legitimacy

https://youtu.be/HDSzUfMZRHE?si=5zezn2AQBDyCsilH A #mainstreaming view of this mess Venezuela has oil, a lot of it. And in a collapsing global system, access to energy is power - not in the abstract, but in the most brutally material sense. When growth stalls, debt grows, and #climatechaos tightens the margins, oil stops being a commodity and becomes leverage. Control over it is no longer about markets; it’s about survival for #blinded states and profit for capital. What the United […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/venezuela-loot-not-legitimacy/

Late-stage capitalism doesn’t expand by building - it expands by stripping assets. When growth fails, extraction replaces development.

Trump didn’t invent this, he just dropped the pretence. The Biden administration didn’t reverse it, they polished it.

Different language, same mess.

#Mainstreaming progressive critique wasted ten years focusing on hypocrisy, norms, and credibility. But that’s a category error.

You can’t shame a system that no longer cares about legitimacy. You can’t expose corruption when corruption is the operating model.

This is not about #Trump. It’s not about one country. It’s about a system that has replaced politics with managed extraction and calls it order.

This isn’t a lie to be debunked, it’s a bribe to be refused. And refusal only works collectively, outside the institutions that profit from the lie.

That’s the hard part, the work we need to do #OMN

Belief in technical decentralisation

This space has a long history. The #fediverse grew out of the “cats” of libertarianism and, to a lesser extent, anarchism - notably without the (O). That lineage mattered. It shaped the instincts of the space: suspicion of central authority, an emphasis on autonomy, and a belief that technical decentralisation could substitute for social and political process. I wrote this a few years ago. Today the landscape has shifted. This #openweb space is increasingly layered with #NGO capture and […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/belief-in-technical-decentralisation/

A mainstream example of (stupid) individualism

Have you noticed how, over the last few decades, many sentences are repeated so often they start to become "common sense"? “You need to love yourself” is one of these, it sounds harmless, kind, even progressive. But this sentence didn’t only reshape how we feel about ourselves - it reshapes how the economy works. This is a story about how "self-esteem" become an engine of #stupidindividualism, that helped produce the explosion of inequality and mess we now live inside. Today, […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/a-mainstream-example-of-stupid-individualism/

An example of the mess from #deathcult centrism

Don’t worry too much, the corporate world has solutions, we look here at #ESG which stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. Its advocates say that if companies disclose enough data about their environmental and social behaviour, “good” corporate conduct will be rewarded by investors with higher share prices. Let's really look at #ESG, for what they are, #greenwash, a system of delay, distraction, and capture - on this #deatcult path this it is not a mistake, it is a function. […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/an-example-of-the-mess-from-deathcult-centrism/

A mainstream question, what happened?

People keep asking the same question, because daily life keeps getting harder: Why is everything so expensive? Why is everyone so stressed? Why does it feel like the economy is rigged? The short answer is - it is - The longer answer matters, because this didn’t happen by accident. For most of human history, wealth inequality was brutal. A tiny elitist crew owned almost everything, and most people lived short, precarious lives. That only changed briefly, and recently. The Post-war […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/a-mainstream-question-what-happened/

#mainstreaming

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