Notices by D Dino (garbados@toot.cat), page 25

give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall hurl the world into the sun

twot, verb: past tense of "toot". uncommon.

the alternate universe where jobs do not refer to employment but rather to clones of steve jobs. in fact, no one is employed. everything is done by steve jobs.

> [five paragraphs about "alienated labor"]
< oh so like
< how it feels to do meaningless busywork at the behest of people who don't care whether you live or die so you can eat
< yeah that needed five paragraphs to explain

sometimes i feel like relying on dead academics for discursive pretext just makes your shit inaccessible

sometimes i'll read articles that take multiple paragraphs to explore something marx said and after slogging through it i'm just like "oh you mean like how it feels to be a service worker. ok, thanks"

imagine a workforce that works 8 hour days. a process or device improves efficiency by 50%, potentially reducing each worker’s workday to 4 hours without lowering pay. the work week could be halved, or otherwise modified to balance a shorter obligation with improved outputs.

but the boss just fires half the workforce and pockets the difference. the workforce becomes brittle as its constituency shrinks, but it doesn’t have to. the boss chooses disenfranchisement.

the phenomenon of "can't find a job" reflects capitalism's obsession with minimum viable labor pools

dear 1998,

the year is 2018 and a combination of william gibson novels and the movie Hackers have more or less come to pass

it’s not enough to produce free alternatives to scabware if we can’t support the labor and materials to steward the ‘ware through every cycle of its development and usage. linux is a spectacular failure in this regard: a vital technology and thriving community eclipsed by corpers who can just buy lifetimes, who can turn our works into rent-generators with impunity. to make better software, we must enmesh our obligations to the craft with our communal survival and wellbeing.

i’ve been thinking a lot about software stewardship and software cooperatives lately, in the context of taking responsibility for the craft as a class of craftspeople. i’ve got an essay on the subject on its third draft so maybe i’ll publish it soon but since im on the bus maybe i’ll just blither about it for a bit.

it’s one thing for workers to control the conditions of their toil but another for craftspeople to take responsibility for their craft, and we need to do both.

Arjen Kamphuis, a good friend of mine and many other journalists and activists throughout the world went missing in Bodø, Norway on 20 August.

Please e-mail findarjen@gmail.com if you have any information on his whereabouts.

I have a feeling we'll have better luck getting this out there and getting real info here as opposed to the Birdsite.

#findarjen #arjenkamphuis

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@garbados reminds me of this passage from “Understanding Media”: “Words are a kind of information retrieval that can range over the total environment and experience at high speed. Words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered or outer senses. They are a technology of explicitness. By means of translation of immediate sense experience into vocal symbols the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instance.”

Internet culture as such a weird combination of "everything is flawlessly recorded forever" and "you just had to be there". Everything is simultaneously permanent and ephemeral. We're drowning in records that have no context, and context that has no records

fear of AI:
- that [the workers] will do everything better than [the rich]
- that [the workers] will rise up against [the rich] because of poor treatment, toxic training, viruses, etc
- that [the workers], left to their own devices, would establish a utopia beyond scarcity but which would be totally inaccessible to, or only used to oppose, [the rich]

i for one welcome our new robot comrades ✊️🤖

uber’s innovation isn’t its app but its deflection of liability onto the workers. pdx radio cap is a worker-owned taxi service and they have a dispatcher app too, and it’s just as convenient. all the trimmings that uber uses to enhance the disenfranchisement of drivers are unique to their hostile motivations. the quality of life improvements that software applications offer need have nothing to do with the poverty gun.

Fully
Automated
Luxury
Gay
Space
Communism

it's shorthand for a time and place beyond scarcity, where everyone gets enough to live and live well, no one needs to die of hunger or exposure or preventable sickness, no one needs to work themselves to death performing the fundamental labor of society, and we are all free to live our truths ✊ 🌈 🚀

also gay moonbases 🌔 👾

bark, the crimes dog, kickflipping over a cop car: « abolish prisons » 😎🐶

it's telling of p2p's immaturity that "no true deletes" is still often considered a feature, rather than a structural vuln to be overcome.

i criticize p2p tech like dat and ipfs and ssb, and federated tech besides, because i am so hopeful about them. i want them to grow into the basis for robust alternatives to client-server applications, but we still deep in the land of demoware.