If you want a sandwich, you have to make it.

yeah, it’s quite big, because in a way it’s the biggest win so far for the BDS in American tech.

I wrote about this topic too, if you’re interested: https://write.as/conjure-utopia/the-verbose-story-of-how-i-left-the-tech-industry-and-started-washing-miso-jars

I didn’t mention some other systems, but for bigger campaigns ActionNetwork is one of the most used tools and has a lot of integrations, for instance with N8N. I do run some systems with ActionNetwork, mostly for newsletters. The thing of using N8N as a glue layer is that you can integrate with more specialized tools if the need arises, maintaining your custom systems for more niche cases.

I would argue the title implies “leaving the tech industry”, and in the beginning it says the article is for who wants to still work with the same skillset, but outside of the tech industry as in the companies who produce technology for profit. Probably only the tech co-op part can be said to be still within the tech industry

social media site specifically I don’t know, but raids for managing infrastructure for completely legal but politically inconvenient activities, yes, plenty. I remember going to a talk from a guy managing the servers of Extinction Rebellion and he got all his stuff seized, never got accused of anything, had to wait months to get his stuff back and never got back a few things.

I live in Germany, and it’s a totally realistic scenario, especially in Bavaria. They seize computers to intimidate digital activists all the time for way less serious topics.

because a media outlet goes where there are viewers. They write to be read, so there’s little benefit in going on platforms where there’s nobody.

If the protocol doesn’t give incentives for an even distribution of users, it’s not going to be solved by blaming individual instances or individual users.

I wouldn’t say the fediverse is established. It’s a very small and niche phenomenon compared to mainstream social media. By now it’s clear it’s not going to ever grow to an impactful size. It’s here to stay, but it will stay as a minor, geeky thing.

They are exactly the people that have always been advocating for this stuff all along. They are doing their thing. Nothing to be surprised of

As somebody active in the politicization of tech workers, I see this as a great challenge to the stale narrative that tech workers are selfish, childish, passive. Both Luigi Mangione and Aaron Bushnel are tech workers and they are enough to prove a point.

I’m sure an overworked rider struggling to get to the end of the month has time and money to spend on this just to get a basic right protected. Individual solutions to systemic problems never work.

mastercard sends your transaction data live to banks. They sell your data to third parties for marketing, profiling and the likes. Credit score is the least of your problems.

I know because I developed a system, in a major European bank, enriching their transaction data with mastercard data for live, predatory marketing.

Politically, I don’t like him. He had a critical influence in the beginning of the Free Software movement, and its failure can be easily identified in the core ideas that put the freedom of the software before the freedom of the people. The fact he cared more about software than people is reflected in pretty much anything he did.

On a personal level, he seems an insufferable asshole with enough power to get away with toxic behavior. Luckily, I never had to interact with him, but his visibility for sure didn’t help marginalizing toxic egomaniacs in IT communities. Being neurodivergent is not an excuse for being an asshole. He’s the last remnant of an age that hopefully is over.

“debate me” kids are another stereotype on the internet though. The idea that ideas should be entertained and discussed for the sake of it and come without implications attached is just another form of edgyness. It’s another thing that often goes away with age or with touching grass. I know because I was one of them. Now I understand that the fact itself of discussing something publicly has moral implications.

Larping as a tankie is definitely a thing of immature, terminally online kids, but I wouldn’t throw Lenin in the bunch. While Stalin is mostly condemned as a reactionary psychopath by pretty much everybody except a few leftist basement-dwellers, Lenin is still read and taught throughout the world. Nothing edgy in reading Lenin.

Edgy kids on the internet worship other psychopaths like Pol Pot or Hoxha.

Advertising works, nobody denies that. If you see enough ads, on average, your mind will be changed.

Can you point to scientific literature that does prove this statement?

A lot of coopyleft or p2pp projects adopt the license and it’s not discussed that much in the identity of the project.

I personally believe that software freedom shouldn’t come at the expense of people’s freedom, and I consider the FOSS movement a political failure because it’s completely incapable of mediating between the two things. New generations are growing more and more alienated from a movement they consider a relic of the past.

For my projects, I avoid FOSS licenses, but they are also not relevant enough to get insights from them.

Since here the answers are split between edgy kids and people repeating a bland, stale narrative about comfort and fear of death, I will try to bring a different perspective.

For context: I grew up in a Catholic country but in a very secular family and in a very secular region. I’ve had an edgy atheist phase that lasted between 8yo and probably around 30yo.

I studied a STEM discipline and have always been surrounded by mostly atheist or agnostic people.

I was afraid of death up until I was 27/28yo, but the cope was gnostic transhumanism, not Abrahamitic religions. At some point I took acid, my gf at the time told me I was going to die, I cried my eyes out for a few minutes and then I was fine and I’m still fine. I had a near-death experience in the hospital that further consolidated the idea that I’m going to die, and it’s chill: if you’re sick, you have a bunch of people looking after you, everybody gives you attention, you spend all your day chilling in bed on drugs. Dream life death.

I was still agnostic at that point. I started approaching spirituality later on, not much because of an emotional need, but because further studies both in STEM disciplines and Philosophy highlighted the limit of reason to explain and understand the world. Reason is a tool among others, with its limits. Limits that can be reasoned about using reason itself. You cannot investigate or explain what lies outside though, let alone change it, something for which you need different tools: faith, spirituality, trust. I got closer to what Erik Davis calls “Cyborg Spiritualism”, but it doesn’t mean much since it’s not an organized movement, but more of a shared intuition and meaning-making process to which, in the last 60 years, more and more people arrived. Especially people dealing with disciplines like system theory, cybernetics, system design, and information theory, but also people disillusioned with the New Age movement or other Western Gnostic practices. Mixed in it there’s plenty of animism.

Atheists believe that all religions are about speaking to God, and hoping for an answer, while many religions are about listening to God because they are already talking to us all the time.