I followed a similar trajectory, leaving the tech sector to pursue politically-motivated jobs. Am I locked-in? Probably, my linkedin is full of agitprop. Do I care? No, the world is on fire, there’s no coming back. I get to the end of the month, I’m doing important stuff, fuck careers, there are more important things.

The person I know that got fired is even more gung-ho than me so I can imagine they don’t care either.

From what I know, no. It’s full of more politically-aligned workplaces, like NGOs and research groups, that crave politically-motivated people with tech skills. I know personally one of the fired workers that went on to do a PhD right after being fired.

user research is a common design and marketing term to mean “identify product consumption and interface preferences”

In Italy they are probably above 90% of the workforce. They are the defining form of IT sector. In the USA way less, and also individual contractors are legal, while in Italy they are not, so there’s a whole issue of illicit dynamics (“body rental”) which in the USA are equally a problem, but they are not illicit and nobody cares about them.

Shitty, exploitative consultancies exist wherever there’s an IT sector, but in certain countries, like Italy, Brazil, or Romania, they are the only form and this shapes the union landscape a lot. Romenia proves that this is not a blocker to achieve high union density though.

Every kink is a kink because the object of the kink holds some specific value or logic within the social context that is then relived or subverted within the kinky dynamic. If foot worshipping wasn’t, historically and symbolically, an act of submission in society, it wouldn’t be a kink at all.

I’m far from being a doomer. I just don’t believe technology will save us. There are better ways.

open source startups are still part of the same ecosystem that fuels big tech. Big tech, being more powerful, can capture commons very easily and that’s true for the vast majority of open-source code. The very concept of open-source was conceived by a person with the same ideological and cultural background of the tech oligarchs now in power.

yeah and it does harm. Any technology amputated a part of us. The point is deciding if it’s worth the cost.

yes. That’s how Mussolini and Hitler got into power.

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.

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.