/u/outwrangle before everything went to shit in 2020, /u/emma_lazarus for a while after that, now I’m all queermunist!
I read another book along similar lines called If We Burn, which was a broader look at the 2010s protest movements that sprung up from online activism. What I took away from it is that most of that activism was hollow and didn’t have a political vision or party program, it was just the masses shouting “No!” at their shitty governments. It was also easily put down once people in power got used to it.
Hotter take: patents shouldn’t exist.
Trump is the most American president we’ve ever had.
Oh shit thats a menu! I thought it was huge bulk cans on a shelf lol
Can someone explain the bulk can of “ranch wrap”?
Without tracking they don’t have metrics for their ads, which effects reports and pricing. They really want to know if someone looks at an ad.
People use Archive links to avoid giving sites traffic.
This is a problem for advertisers and media corps.
Not saying they’re the ones doing this, but they’d definitely benefit.
I don’t like change! 😣
I only use the computer for word processing, internet, and playing roguelikes.
Fine. I guess I’ll learn Linux 😒
Okay, but in the US they don’t want to risk two cops messing up their witness testimony. Better to just have one, because a cop’s word is law anyway.
But then we’d have to consume less, and they don’t want that.
You don’t work with people, not really. You manage them. Your job is to strategically use them for maximum productivity; workers might be allowed some small amount of input but only as long as it can be fit within your “roadmap strategy”. Your job it to discipline the workers and keep them on task. And, of course, make sure they never unionize.
These problems are structural. I don’t care what your motivations are, your class position is as an underling enforcer for the boss and you’re bourgeoisified by your position within the class structure. A manager, within this specific class structure, has every incentive to be an enemy of the workers. An individual manager can choose to become a class traitor, and people in management can be extremely powerful union organizers! But it rarely happens because it requires they betray their own class interests. It’s structural.
I’m not opposed to hierarchical organizational structures?
Under capitalism, the job of every single manager is to extract as much surplus value from the workers as possible. That’s their actual economic function. The problem isn’t the organizational model, the problem is the larger economic system they exist within.
If you had some kind of horizontal non-hierarchical collective under capitalism all that could do is turn everyone inside of it into petite-managers and force them to exploit themselves in order to hit productivity quotas. Or, more likely, it would fail because people don’t want to do that shit to themselves and need to be used and abused by a manager to make capitalism function.
There’s a few countries with huge hydroelectric resources, which are not applicable to most of the world. Other countries have merely seen a peak and slight decline, and based on trends it will take decades for that decline to reach the levels we need tomorrow. Demand for compute from the AI tech bubble has basically destroyed all the progress we’ve made since the pandemic.
The problem is too much consumption. Rich nations gobble up as much as they can and poorer nations are used as their mining pits and factories to feed the endless appetite for more, and as long as this continues the world is going to continue warming.
This will not save us, we’re still set to burn way too much fossil fuel even with fast EV/solar/electrification.
We. Need. To. Consume. Less.
Oh I absolutely loved it, don’t get me wrong. I lived through that decade as my own political awakening, so every single event described was something I watched super closely and posted about and participated in as part of the online activist space (and sometimes in person!)
Your observation that the social media companies can leverage and benefit from these protest movements (and perhaps even create them) is important, I think. It’s probably why Musk bought Twitter, he wanted to wield that kind of power over the masses and their ability to organize. It seems to have worked, too. We don’t see anything like what we saw in the 2010s these days.