Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 183

@h I don't agree, but this sentence probably summarizes a much larger set of thoughts, which I could easily be misreading. Can you expand on this? @mike_hales @KevinCarson1 @mayel @matslats

@entro @adfeno
For the record, this complaint was from about six months ago, and was resolved within a few days of being posted on the forum. As the complainant said at the time:
> "As this forum is not full of complaints from Technoethical’s customers, I think it is fairly reasonable to say that my case is probably just a very unfortunate coincidence of multiple things leading to a very unsatisfying end (for me at least)."

@enkiv2 that sounds like a lot of work, and likely to produce a lot of confusion. But let a million flowers bloom I guess ...

@ink_slinger I check with my wife, she only uses her face cloths for her face. Turns out you are a kinky weirdo after all ;-P

@muzkore @aral I was introduced to the idea of corporations as psychopaths by the excellent documentary The Corporation, which is required viewing for anyone who wants to understand the political-economy of the 21st century. I also recommend the Charles Stross novel #Accelerando, which riffs on the concepts by representing corporations as AI bots.

@mike_hales I think we substantially agree here. But I feel obliged to point out that if values don't exist, neither does production. They're both typed of storytelling about systems of physical interactions between humans and resources. Values are stories about means, productions are stories about ends.
@h @KevinCarson1 @mayel @matslats

@clacke what I mean is that each book has enough characters and detail that you could make 2-3 seasons out of each one, and doing so would improve the series. What made GoT so compelling at first wasn't the major story arcs (wars, dragons, ice zombies etc), but the way those larger events affected the lives and relationships of the characters. The last couple of seasons raced through the former, with very little attention to the latter :-(

I'd love to be able to recommend Frostwire as a torrent client. The built-in search is great and I love that the client promotes creative work under CreativeCommons licenses. But their chat uses Slack and worse, they bundle dodgy proprietary add-ons from #DataFarms like Yahoo and now Farcebook into the installer for Mac OS (and presumably Windows). #Avoid

@enkiv2 Enspiral are well worth learning more about. They are one model of how tech can work when it takes the form of mission-driven international cooperation, rather than profit-driven multinational corporation. Here's #DougRushkoff interviewing them for his #TeamHuman podcast (BTW Doug has written a whole book on the potential social benefits of universal tech literacy and helped organise coding education events)
https://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-110-enspiral-better-work-together/

@enkiv2 if something is perceived to be in demand, snake oil salesmen will gather to try to fulfill that demand. A lot of bullshit course on "Agile(TM)" sell bullshit that is the opposite of the values and principles laid out in the Agile Manifesto. A lot of "green" products are anything but. I'm not saying it's not valuable to point this out, but rather than it's not valuable to lump to real thing in with the snake oil version people try to sell off the back of its hard-won successes.

@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.

@enkiv2 in the 20th century vulgar marxists did the same kind of thing in their newspapers. They would valorize union organizing in the form of strikes etc, but scoff at mutual aid efforts like credit unions and mutual assurance schemes which were also important outputs of union organizing. Many credit unions and mutuals began as a labour movement response to banks and insurance companies which refused to accept waged workers as customers.

@enkiv2 no it's still a useful article. I just encourage the folks at Jacobin, and anyone who reads the article, to be wary of the way centralist socialists tend to reduce complex social situations to bosses with agency, and worker-drones manipulated by them, totally ignoring a lot of the mutual aid and solidarity organizing that's already going on (outside the traditional industrial union forms), and ascribing its outputs and successes to conspiracy by the bosses.

@KevinCarson1 @mike_hales do either of you know?

Anyone know if Harry Cleaver (author of 'Reading Capital Politically') is on the #fediverse? Or any social media?

@remotenemesis @enkiv2 @aparrish @TheGibson do they though, and how does this blur the line between worker and consumer?

@enkiv2 @aparrish @remotenemesis @TheGibson now I don't disagree with their claims about the reason for corporations supporting and sponsoring tech education. I just think that presenting independent tech education like this, without putting it in the context of the social mission driving most of the people who kickstarted these styles of practice, renders invisible a huge chunk of the very political organizing among tech workers they are arguing for.

@enkiv2 @aparrish @remotenemesis @TheGibson
... and this one:
> "Their goal in technology education is not to simply expand their consumer base to the youngest and most marginalized of our society, but to increase the labor supply of the future and subsequently drive down wages for decades to come."

@enkiv2 @aparrish @remotenemesis @TheGibson
I'm thinking of passages like this one:
"As part of a longer-term strategy, these tech giants have also partnered with schools, supported coding bootcamps, and sponsored programs that teach minority youth groups to code"