Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. This was a bit late - I was too busy goofing around on Discord)
@CinnasVerses itās almost as if the people running ycombinator had some sort of vested interest in a particular framing of tech stories
Maciej Ceglowski said that one reason he gave up on organizing SoCal tech workers was that they kept scheduling events in a Google meeting room using their Google calendar with āRe: Union organizing?ā as the subject of the meeting.
@CinnasVerses the valley is rife with these āwisdom is your dump statā folks. can invert a binary tree on a whiteboard but might accidentally drown themselves in a rain puddle
(Detaches whiteboard from wall, turns whiteboard upside-down)
Inverted, motherfuckers
famous last words, āwe are currently clean on opsecā
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10x developers, 0.1x proletariat.
The stakhanov we have at home
maciej cegÅowski is also a self-serving arse, so iād take anything he says with a large grain of salt.
His talks are great, but his time as a union organizer and campaign fundraiser left him so disillusioned that he headed in a reactionary direction (and neglected the business that lets him throw himself at random projects). He is a case study why getting on twitter is a very bad idea.
heās also a self-important arse, which is kinda problematic when one tries to do organising. (one of the very important part is that doing the union work is not a social club, and you may need to work with and accommodate people whom you personally very much dislike.)
I have never met Ceglowski or talked to anyone involved in his movements. These days I am doing some local things rather than join in the endless smartphone arguments about āeveryone should be an activist and organizer!ā vs. āI tried that and the things that make me good at writing long essays about politics / viral social media posts make me bad at organizing to elect a city counselor.ā
again, my point here is that cegÅowski is an unreliable narrator; you should not build an opinion based on his anecdotes (or his transphobia).
Itās a power play. Engineers know that theyāre valuable enough that they can organize openly; also, as in the case of Alphabet Workers Union, engineers can act in solidarity with contractors, temps, and interns. Iāve personally done things like directly emailing CEOs with reply-all, interrupting all-hands to correct upper management on the law, and other fun stuff. One does have to be sufficiently skilled and competent to invoke the Steve Martin principle: ābe so good that they canāt ignore you.ā
I wonder what would have happened if Ceglowski had kept focused on talks and on working with the few Bay Area tech workers who were serious about unionizing, regulation, and anti-capitalism. It seemed like after the response to his union drive was smaller and less enthusiastic than he had hoped, he pivoted to cybersecurity education and campaign fundraising.
One of his warnings was that the megacorps are building systems so a few opinionated tech workers canāt block things. Assuming that a few big names will always be able to hold back a multibilliondollar company through individual action so they donāt need all that frustrating organizing seems unwise (as we are seeing in the state of the market for computer touchers in the USA).
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