chobeat

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.

It could also be an inside job. Anti-genocide resistance within Microsoft is quite strong and active.

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.

Quit this bullshit. A lot of tech workers working remotely are contractors, precarious workers. Content moderators, data labelers, and the likes are not paid 6 figures and they are not privileged. Most of the workforce of these companies are not white, rich dudebros. Stuff like this adds insult to injury.

I think this depends on whether it’s properly implemented. If it’s properly implemented, it’s Universal and does therefore not depend on social compliance.

No system willingly surrender its power. Any implementation of UBI in the current power structure will just reproduce the current power structure.

I disagree. Giving resources to people solves problems, including housing, education, and medical care. Maybe the details of where and how to allocate the resources need more elaboration.

If this happens in a way that benefit people, it means the power shift already happened and the UBI is just the consequence of it, not the cause. The hard problem is the power shift, not the details of the UBI, that are reduced to a technical problem. Technical solutions follow from a rearrangement of society, not the other way around, despite what hackerinos and techbros believe.

Actually, I would like to keep the system from collapsing. If it does collapse, it will cause devastating harm on not only you, but all of society, probably turning it into ruins and a state-beyond-return.

The current system based on consumption, growth, and the industrial/post-industrial productive mode is unsustainable. It's going to collapse regardless of UBI. Conservatives and reactionaries are so supportive of UBI exactly because it has the power to extend the "business as usual" a little longer, until bigger factors like soil exhaustion, climate collapse, biosphere collapse, oil EROI and other major factors will eventually make our mode of living unfeasible. That's not an argument against UBI per se, but we should be wary of how it can be appropriated to make our life worse and this is a very concrete consequence. UBI as a starting step (good) vs UBI as a pacifier (bad).

Realistically, that’s not gonna happen. There’s not gonna be a “worker’s revolution” in the US. The rich take it all, leaving nothing for the poor. Dreams of a “revolution” are fairytales people tell themselves at night to sleep easier. If you really want change and to improve lifes, advocate for UBI. It really helps.

I'm not a revolutionary. I don't believe revolutions have ever happened. I also don't believe a major political change is going to happen in fascist USA anytime soon, unless Trump really fucks up his game. Sometimes there are just no good moves.

UBI without worker's power and strong unions will just become a leash in the hands of the state to enforce social compliance. Unions and UBIs are not mutually exclusive. Also without strong unions, who do you think will advocate for UBIs? Neo-nazi, billionaires, and other people that want to give the bare minimum to defend the status quo from its collapse. The first to talk about UBI in the USA was Nixon, and it's not by chance. The élites see the UBI as yet another tool to maintain the status quo and their privilege, giving scraps to the rest and subduing the state to make their own interest. UBI is a technical tool and therefore, by itself, it doesn't solve social problems or shifts power. The shift of power should happen contextually to the introduction of the UBI, otherwise, it will just turn into yet another way to oppress the working class.