if you want to know more about TWC: https://techworkerscoalition.org/
fixed them, thank you
It’s hand-written and it’s a famous blog about techno-magic. Also it’s very explicitly against new age, that’s the whole point of the article.
They have fascists in power and they still care about language. Also missing the whole context since they clearly didn’t read the article.
well, it’s full of nazi furries
yes. That’s how Mussolini and Hitler got into power.
What’s happening is wildly inconstitutional and violent in nature. It’s just not military violence for a military coup. Not all coups involve the military, that, if anything, here might be a stabilizing force.
After the USAID thing I called it this morning: Before the end of march the U.S. is a dictatorship in all but name.
You’re optimistic. Yarvinists are openly advocating for dictatorship.
USAID was a probing attack, gauge the reactions, develop plans, figure out how to do it better with the next department. You don’t start with Homeland Security, the CIA, or the FBI - that’s the final part.
Well, debatable. Purging the secret services first is always a great idea when you’re doing a coup.
Not everybody likes information density. Different targets, different styles.
The coup Is mostly through digital means at the moment. They are seizing IT systems and firing sysadmins who do not comply. It’s totally about technology, because this is the first coup done in a fully-digitalized global power and it looks nothing like the ones we have seen recently.
You cannot escape social norms. The act of rejecting them doesn’t free you from them. You will be judged for rejecting them and others will adapt to it, either by rejecting them too and creating a new social norm, or shunning you and attaching a certain rejection to a specific social signal. There’s nothing artificial on it. The logic you describe is very oblivious to how social norms and social actors work.
Also here we are talking about webcams not really as technological artifacts, but as social tools. Obviously it’s not a technical requirement to be presentable, but a social requirement, that’s implicit in the discussion.
It could also be an inside job. Anti-genocide resistance within Microsoft is quite strong and active.
“Virtual backgrounds as the norm” is an interesting practice, pretty much like school uniforms erasing difference in class by dressing everybody the same.
virtual and blurred backgrounds still signal a lot. Not only they let the viewer know that your environment is not nice, but they also become aware you’re somewhat ashamed of it, enough to be willing to hide it.
Most people are not free from the need to work and might have plenty of personal factors pushing them into compliance. Working for a company that gives good conditions and good salary should never be shamed. First because it alienates the people in question, reinforcing their disregard for any ethical or political discussion. Then because it sow division among the workers. The choice of the word “guilty” makes it worse.
Working for an evil company is not intrinsically an evil act: you might be trying to unionize it, you might sabotage it from within, for your own interest (taking naps) or political reasons, you might be salting it.
If you really want to run a purity test on people, you should try at least to assess the space of action they have to fight against the company evil practices, their knowledge of it, the risks they are taking if they went for action. If a person has a chance to act against the evil impact of the company, risks pretty much nothing, has all the knowledge and psychological strength to act, and then doesn’t act, then we can start talking about unethical behavior.
Technology cannot be disentangled from society and the economics that create and develop it. Technology is social process, it is not a technical matter.
The idea that technology is a thing on its own, maybe even with its own agency, is an ideological stance pushed first and foremost by the people you don’t want to hear about exactly for the purpose of obscuring their role in the whole deal.
You should start the union
Pitting different types of workers against each other automatically promotes you to a scab. Purism and sectarianism are much more harmful to labor organizing than union busting.
I’m a union organizer in tech. My downvote was the 8th, not the 1st. I was busy doing a call with striking riders in Greece. Keep up the good work, scab.
yeah and it does harm. Any technology amputated a part of us. The point is deciding if it’s worth the cost.