chobeat

I'm not part of Google. I'm not even American. You're taking a specific worst case to generalize for a global industry. Google is an anomaly in every regard.

To more directly speak to tech worker unionization, if you speak to the workers at most companies you will have the least productive organizing conversations you will ever experience. They are much, much more resistant to identifying workplace issues, much more sympathetic with management, much more willing to narc on organizing efforts, and much more likely to ideologically oppose unions.

Ah but I do, I'm part of tech workers coalition. For sure there's ground to gain, but in the last 5 years, or compared to my university years, it has been an immense change, change that is possibly still invisible from the outside. For instance, I now see tech workers a lot more prone to collective action than categories like designers, architects or chefs that are hopelessly fragmented.

This is narrative is getting more and more stale. It was definitely convincing maybe 15 years ago, now those same people are the ones spearheading unionization efforts in most US tech companies. Obviously it is always a mix of roles, but engineering roles are often the majority in most efforts, even just because they tend to be the majority of the company.

At every round of layoffs, the identity of the tech engineer as a tech worker gets stronger and stronger.

because they picked companies which haven't yet formed a union or just formed a minority union (like Google). Many other tech companies have already unionized.

On top of that, some of these companies have wild union busting strategies.

Also Blind is a shitty source.

you use "luddite" as if it's an insult. History proved luddites were right in their demands and they were fighting the good fight.

we do, and anybody telling you "it's complicated" has an agenda.

Please yankee, don't make everything happening in the world about you

Gnosticism is by definition the epitome of duality. That said, conflict with a reactionary entity doesn't imply you're not reactionary. Russia and Ukraine are at war with each other and they are both very reactionary, becoming even worse due to the needs produced by such conflict.

Also, hackers tend to hold libertarian (in the European sense) values and that's how they pick their targets for direct action. When I say they are reactionary, they are reactionary in effect, not in intent. That makes them even more problematic, because it's not immediately obvious what's the problem.

It would be quite a long argument, but I suggest TechGnosis by Erik Davis and this article: https://www.are.na/block/24206425

tl;dr: hacker culture is grounded in gnostic, individualistic californian hippie culture, and shares root with what is now the dominant, reactionary ideology of big tech moguls, ketamine cryptocolonialists, business white supremacists. One key tenet of hacker culture is the power of the individual super-human brain power to reshape entire societies through the production of disruptive technology. Mr. Robot tv series is one such example of said mindset. It preaches the superiority of the world of minds and the virtual over the material. The material is subject to the virtual and the virtual is where the real stuff is happening, where there's a real confrontation of power (the hacker vs the system, disruptors vs established businesses, out-of-the-box thinkers vs corporate drones). This mimics gnostic beliefs very closely. It is reactionary because it is individualistic, because it erases material conditions and collective action, but it also just operates from such a simplified worldview that it is impossible to adhere to if you have a very basic understanding of disciplines like sociology, history or politics. It's just not how the world works.

I have a few. I'm not the kind of person that says controversial things to attract attention, but I also don't refrain from putting them out there.

A selection of the ones I use in my political activity:

• knowing things doesn't change things
• work should be abolished
• atheism and rationalism are a scourge on the ability of the Left to reach people
• hacker culture is intrinsically gnostic and reactionary

Some others:

• suicidal and self-harming people should be listened to by understanding and validating the motivations behind their desire to hurt or kill themselves, even entertaining with them their own plans. Anything else would likely put a wedge between the two of you that will prevent from addressing the causes and ultimately do what's good for them.
• mathematics is just narrative with rules/arbitrary opinions with rules
• nurses, doctors, teachers and other professions of care attract the worst psychopaths because they are put in charge of vulnerable people. On top of that they are by default perceived as caregivers, so it's harder for them to raise suspicion of doing fucked up stuff.

Edit: people down voting in a thread about controversial opinions must be very very intelligent

We: Italians, Spanish, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Vietnamese, South Asians, Japanese.

Barbarians: everybody else, especially the French

You clearly haven't met a Southern European. We divide the world in civilized ass washers and uncivilized smelly barbarians