So the author’s argument is that youth have just gone to gig work instead of traditional jobs. OK, maybe true, but first of all, this is not a good thing on its own either. And secondly, we have to consider why gig work even exists, aside from being a fresh new way to exploit workers and deny them the traditional protections of the labor market. Because there is a specific reason gig work exists right at this very transitional moment in the workforce, and I’ll give you a spoiler: It exists because of AI.

Considering the author is possibly the most relevant scholar on (against?) platform work, I’m quite sure he would agree with you. The article implies that AI is deskilling and displacing workers and that’s intrinsically a bad thing.

I’ve met the author IRL. He’s quite famous in his niche

there’s an argument that this is just the targeted ads bubble that keeps inflating using different technologies. That’s where the money is coming from. It’s a game of smoke and mirrors, but this time it seems like they are betting big on a single technology for a longer time, which is different from what we have seen in the past 10 years.

It’s Germany, they have labor rights that they want to uphold. This is a so-called “warning strike”, to signal that there will be collective legal action if they get fired without abundant severance pay.

Basically TikTok doesn’t want to negotiate with the union and the union is showing that there’s support for collective legal action instead of a 1-on-1 dismissals that would cost the company way less. The company has an interest in negotiating because it’s quite sure to lose the legal battle.

Most people don’t know they are allowed to dream, let alone in which direction. While this might not connect with you, there are millions of tech workers who have zero perspective on what’s out there.

Many of my direct friends lost their job for doing it. Look up “exposing Zalando”.

Here in Berlin it’s a regular occurrence that any exhibition, cultural or political event criticizing Israel receives at the very list a threatening call and a visit from the police. Sometimes it escalates into vandalism or violence, sometimes with getting raided by the police, sometimes with defunding if it’s a public thing.

If they silenced Albanese and banned Varoufakis, they can silence anybody.

You might have missed a lot of news about Germany. They passed a new law that suspends freedom of speech when it’s against Israel. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-passes-controversial-antisemitism-resolution/a-70715643

There has been plenty of extra-judicial retaliation, i.e. against Francesca Albanese or Oyoun, and we got close to having 4 cases of extra-judicial extradictions without an accusation against pro-Palestine protesters, which a judge eventually blocked.

It’s an elixir skeleton that runs a system of modules you can combine (just with configs) or that you can extend by adding new modules.

The skeleton does the bare minimum and the modules contain all the logic. It’s not a no-code tool (that would be astounding, but doesn’t exist yet), you still need to write some config files (flavours) or write some elixir.

It’s a toolkit to build federated apps, with a social media+blogging+collaboration platform built on top of it.

I followed a similar trajectory, leaving the tech sector to pursue politically-motivated jobs. Am I locked-in? Probably, my linkedin is full of agitprop. Do I care? No, the world is on fire, there’s no coming back. I get to the end of the month, I’m doing important stuff, fuck careers, there are more important things.

The person I know that got fired is even more gung-ho than me so I can imagine they don’t care either.

From what I know, no. It’s full of more politically-aligned workplaces, like NGOs and research groups, that crave politically-motivated people with tech skills. I know personally one of the fired workers that went on to do a PhD right after being fired.

user research is a common design and marketing term to mean “identify product consumption and interface preferences”

In Italy they are probably above 90% of the workforce. They are the defining form of IT sector. In the USA way less, and also individual contractors are legal, while in Italy they are not, so there’s a whole issue of illicit dynamics (“body rental”) which in the USA are equally a problem, but they are not illicit and nobody cares about them.

Shitty, exploitative consultancies exist wherever there’s an IT sector, but in certain countries, like Italy, Brazil, or Romania, they are the only form and this shapes the union landscape a lot. Romenia proves that this is not a blocker to achieve high union density though.

I’m far from being a doomer. I just don’t believe technology will save us. There are better ways.

open source startups are still part of the same ecosystem that fuels big tech. Big tech, being more powerful, can capture commons very easily and that’s true for the vast majority of open-source code. The very concept of open-source was conceived by a person with the same ideological and cultural background of the tech oligarchs now in power.

yeah and it does harm. Any technology amputated a part of us. The point is deciding if it’s worth the cost.

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.

yes. That’s how Mussolini and Hitler got into power.

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.

You should start the union