- 24 Posts
- 22 Comments
21·7 days agoUBI 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.
if it happens, or simply if you get more involved into Romanian unions, reach out to me. I organize events to connect tech workers organizing interionationally, so we might do something.
Go for it. If you want to look for a very good example of union communication, look up “More Perfect Union”. Very American, but it shows a way to bring union news to people in a cool way.
Pretty much anywhere outside the USA, the communication of tech workers unionizing is pretty much absent and expecially news about it. This is a big deal, but it doesn’t say much about the actual penetration of unions in a given sector. It’s a complex topic, but I explain it with the fact that the topic is pretty much uninteresting, unless it’s a well-known brand is unionizing. Since most famous tech companies are American, there’s enough mass of news there to actually push media outlets to cover news.
In Italy, where there are very few “well-known” IT companies, the topic is completely absent, to the point where IT union organizers from a city don’t know about big wins by other IT unions organizers from another city. Nonetheless the narrative is not the thing, and there can be big impacts that become visible to the general public only after sociological studies.
So, long-story short, the fact you never heard about SITT doesn’t say much about its effectiveness, just about their ability to communicate.
Are you aware that Romanian IT sector has the highest rate of unionization of any IT sector in the world? SITT is a case study studied all over the world. https://transform-network.net/blog/interview/the-romanian-it-workers-labour-union-showed-that-everyone-can/
It might not be the sexiest, most modern radical union, but it is a case of success with numbers to show. Maybe you can start from there.
most cursed take of the day. This is a terrible system that turns workers in self-entrepreneurs, where most struggle and a few get a lot of money.
where do you live? The tech workers movement is reaching pretty much everywhere there’s tech production.
luck is not gonna help. Only action and organizing can save us. Join a union too.
yey, more friends to chat with.
Well, Obsidian, Notion, Anytype, Affine can give you a hint of possible directions in this transition. While they still retain document-oriented features, like the concept of Page, they also try to really go for a much richer experience that does away with the limitations inherited from paper-based solutions. Double-linking, composability, fractal properties of pages and nesting (especially in Notion and Anytype), block-based UI, seamless integration of text, databases, and embeds, heavy use of transclusion and other stuff like that.
I would say this alternative system is far from cohesive and mature, but it’s clear some software is emancipating itself from whatever Onlyoffice represents.
Maybe you would find this video interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXiQlLHuK7g
I am sure that some people wouldn’t like the fact that the interface runs as a webapp, or use of Java, but it’s strange to me that it’s not usually even in the conversation.
A point about conversations, rather than the software itself. I think it’s not really at the forefront of the discussion because this kind of software caters kinda to “legacy” organizational environments that want a 1 to 1 replacement for Google Docs or Microsoft 365, which is not the sexiest problem. In the community of adopters of NextCloud (poor souls…) the discussion between onlyoffice and collabora, together with their integration with NC, is a quite common topic but again, most of these deal with orgs and not individual adoption and I would say that’s a very distinct crowd from most “hackerinos” who populate the FOSS online communities.
That said, a lot of the discourse is now focused on moving away entirely from document-based (and even document-oriented) software, because there’s a shared understanding that the problem is in the approach itself, and what IBM, Apple and Microsoft considered a reasonable way to handle information in the '80s, is not necessarily the best way now.
what years of culture war do to the human mind
I’m Italian. We had a long season of leftist terrorism with popular support. People started feeling alienated when they kidnapped and killed the centrist prime minister because he wanted to ally with the Left. Kneecapping dozens of CEOS just won the terrorists more and more support.
Also sympathy to causes is different from power. We should be concerned less with how an action impacts public opinions and more on how it impacts power structures, potential for action and mobilization.
At that age I had similar ideas. This didn’t stop me from turning as leftist as it gets. Anyway it is all irrelevant. He did firebomb the walmart, he did the redacted and that’s enough to absolve him from any leftist sin. Don’t you dare turn this into yet another culture war.
If Israel is a colonial project, any relationship fueling its economy is supporting the war. This includes touristic activities, investments, any kind of business.
The BDS movement worked against South Africa because it was totalizing and any chance to suffocate the Israeli colonial project must go through the same strategy.
Me, 404media or Zuckerberg?
2·3 months agoare you familiar with left-wing blockchain and that whole strand of research or you just talk because you have no clue about the fact that there’s always been plenty of anti-capitalist and post-capitalist in the blockchain scene?
Have you watched the video or just stopped at the title?
There’s a lot of lefitsts spaces in the blockchain. While they are minoritarian, they have a distinct political agenda and set of values, separate from most of the web3 world. They either envision the usage of blockchain for local economies (an evolution of circular economy and local currencies that were popular in the 90’s and 2000s), or more global scale realignment of incentives, either through socialist market economies or more planning-oriented solutions.
No system willingly surrender its power. Any implementation of UBI in the current power structure will just reproduce the current power structure.
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.
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).
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.