Conversation

Notices

1. Tsundoku Psychohazard (enkiv2@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Sunday, 18-Nov-2018 09:28:57 EST Tsundoku Psychohazard

   Tech Workers Need to Keep Organizing https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/11/tech-worker-organizing-google-union-walkout

   1. Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Sunday, 18-Nov-2018 11:04:33 EST Strypey

      in reply to

      @enkiv2 there's a lot of good analysis in this piece, but also a lot of assumptions which I strongly disagree with, many of which revolve around completely ignoring the agency of geeks outside their role as employees, and the influence of social movements in tech like the software freedom movement and CreativeCommons. For example, hackathons have nothing to do with priming people to create VC-funded startups. This is a bizarre assumption that nobody who has been part of a hackathon would make.

      1. Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Sunday, 18-Nov-2018 11:07:41 EST Strypey

         in reply to

         @enkiv2 similarly, while I agree that increasing the supply of workers with coding skills could have an effect on tech wages in the future, that doesn't justify leaping to the assumption that organizations teaching people to code are simply dupes of the tech corporations and their owners. There are many ethical motivations for running code academies, such as upskilling workers for social enterprise and NGO work, or even just empowering people to understand the tech they use every day.

         1. Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Sunday, 18-Nov-2018 11:12:30 EST Strypey

            in reply to

            @enkiv2 there is a lot of suspicion of open plan offices and hot desking these days, but in general I think they are an improvement on the alienating battery hen style cubicle offices they replace. Yes, they are more suitable for some types of work than others, and I understand that some people want to be able to close a door and work privately at times. But open plans are not that much cheaper than cubicles, and the article offers no justification for its claim that this is why they're used.

            1. Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Sunday, 18-Nov-2018 12:09:26 EST Strypey

               in reply to

               @enkiv2 the bit about Apple's 1984 ads is totally ahistorical, almost to the point of paranoia. It's well known that those ads were a dig at IMB and corporate culture, not governments or unions. Also, the false dichotomy of individualism vs. collectivism is itself a core tenet of "Californian ideology" (Reaganism/ neo-liberalism), and I find it endlessly frustrated when leftists uncritically accept this framing.