It would be quite a long argument, but I suggest TechGnosis by Erik Davis and this article: https://www.are.na/block/24206425

tl;dr: hacker culture is grounded in gnostic, individualistic californian hippie culture, and shares root with what is now the dominant, reactionary ideology of big tech moguls, ketamine cryptocolonialists, business white supremacists. One key tenet of hacker culture is the power of the individual super-human brain power to reshape entire societies through the production of disruptive technology. Mr. Robot tv series is one such example of said mindset. It preaches the superiority of the world of minds and the virtual over the material. The material is subject to the virtual and the virtual is where the real stuff is happening, where there’s a real confrontation of power (the hacker vs the system, disruptors vs established businesses, out-of-the-box thinkers vs corporate drones). This mimics gnostic beliefs very closely. It is reactionary because it is individualistic, because it erases material conditions and collective action, but it also just operates from such a simplified worldview that it is impossible to adhere to if you have a very basic understanding of disciplines like sociology, history or politics. It’s just not how the world works.

I have a few. I’m not the kind of person that says controversial things to attract attention, but I also don’t refrain from putting them out there.

A selection of the ones I use in my political activity:

• knowing things doesn’t change things
• work should be abolished
• atheism and rationalism are a scourge on the ability of the Left to reach people
• hacker culture is intrinsically gnostic and reactionary

Some others:

• suicidal and self-harming people should be listened to by understanding and validating the motivations behind their desire to hurt or kill themselves, even entertaining with them their own plans. Anything else would likely put a wedge between the two of you that will prevent from addressing the causes and ultimately do what’s good for them.
• mathematics is just narrative with rules/arbitrary opinions with rules
• nurses, doctors, teachers and other professions of care attract the worst psychopaths because they are put in charge of vulnerable people. On top of that they are by default perceived as caregivers, so it’s harder for them to raise suspicion of doing fucked up stuff.

We: Italians, Spanish, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Vietnamese, South Asians, Japanese.

Barbarians: everybody else, especially the French

You clearly haven’t met a Southern European. We divide the world in civilized ass washers and uncivilized smelly barbarians

I use Notion+Notion Calendar for this and I delegate to it a lot of stuff: bureaucracy, booking the barber, changing the bedsheets, all my work, birthdays, etc etc. How can people trust their brain with more than two or three items is unfathomable to me. I mean, when I was younger I could keep in mind a dozens upcoming appointments and go through them every few hours to make sure I wouldn’t miss anything, but as soon as your routine is disturbed by work stuff, it’s impossible.

you have no fucking clue how brittle systems like electronics production, or oil supply are. USA, from a systemic point of view, is the most coupled and fragile production system in the world except maybe some micro-nation in the middle of the ocean.

Months? You clearly haven’t tried Pyanodons.

Jokes aside, yeah, it would be a killer.

mastercard sends your transaction data live to banks. They sell your data to third parties for marketing, profiling and the likes. Credit score is the least of your problems.

I know because I developed a system, in a major European bank, enriching their transaction data with mastercard data for live, predatory marketing.

nah, you will attract only those that already kinda agree. All the others will see weirdos with weird ideas, weird clothing and weird vocabulary, approaching them in the street or promoting events that they don’t care about.

“talking to people” is something I do since I’m in union organizing and the way people react to the same arguments varies wildly over time. After the waves of layoffs in the tech sector, non-politicized tech workers are incredibly more receptive to pro-union rhetoric, in a way that would have been impossible before.

About accelerationism: I’m not saying failing an election is a necessary step in a teleological sense. You should enter elections to win them, if you do it. Nonetheless it is useful to radicalize people. It is a recuperation of what is perceived as a defeat in a system in order to feed a different system. Electoral betrayal is useful, but not necessarily something you should strive for, as an armchair accelerationist would claim. There are better ways to spend your time and energy imho, but if it happens, it is still good manure for growing the seeds of something new.

leftist might be a bit derogatory, but it’s not really an insult, come on.

The mistake of this logic is to believe that this betrayal of electoral logic won’t radicalize people. It is a necessary step. There are now 11 Million French people, many of which probably don’t believe much in electoralism but vote anyway, who are furious at what’s happening.

People don’t change their mind listening to arguments, they change their mind living experiences. The experience of joy after winning, followed by the disregard of democratic logic by Macron, will mobilize an insane amount of popular energy, contrary to snarky “electoralism doesn’t work” comments that are relatable only to a microscopic niche of edgy, maximalist leftists.

I’m not American and I don’t even vote. Get off the internet and touch grass pls.

Quitting the for-profit sector for political and moral reasons. Not easy and it’s still a struggle, but I keep going.

You two, get a room

If you’re wondering, no Appflowy cannot be used to replace Notion. It’s in their claim but you would have a pretty bad time doing it. Anytype might one day get there, Appflowy is another thing.

Bonfire, with its direct support for OpenScience features, would be a better alternative

Join Tech Workers Coalition then. https://techworkerscoalition.org/

Union organizing should be done across departments. Anyway software developers are doing a lot of organizing and unionizing, exactly because they have more secure positions. AWU, Kickstarter, NYT, Grindr, and many others are almost entirely office workers, many of which are software developers. Software developers are tech workers: drawing lines doesn’t help anybody and historically has always been to the detriment of the workers movement. Software developers start organizing when they stop being software developers and become tech workers.

Also FYI: I’ve been a software developer for a decade and I mostly organize software developers that, if anything, are overrepresented in “tech workers” spaces, to the point where we have to put rules like “don’t talk about git, it scares the workers” to prevent the spaces to become cliquey.

What do you mean? The USA has a lot of momentum and a lot of tech companies are unionizing, many more than anywhere else. It’s on mainstream newspapers every other day

I’m a union organizer in tech. I’m Italian, but I live in Germany and I do interact a lot with American organizers.

In Germany, most organizing is effectively cleansed of political identity and needs to be conducted in a very sanitized environment to be appealing to workers. It’s also very very focused on the legal aspects.

Americans are way more technical about the whole of it: more methodologies, more processes, more tools, it’s a game of numbers.

Italians…, well, let’s say the unions there deserve the hate. Not because they are particularly corrupted or conservative (which they are), but because they have no fucking clue what they are doing. They are much slower than their foreign counterparts, they have no resources, they have very little coordination and no interest in getting better. Like many things in Italy, they are slowly sinking in the quicksand. The organizers on the ground they are often under prepared and they have no concept of methodology: they know their legal stuff, but they believe that building momentum in the workplace is just a matter of identifying the right arguments and deliver the right speech at the worker assemblies. Basically they rely on luck, workers motivation and 50 years old processes. They also have no operational coordination on a regional or national level. People from the same union working on the same category don’t know or talk to each other unless they work in the same physical office.