can’t promise I will have time to read it, but feel free

this feels a lot like a rediscovery of constructivism?

since botting is so easy, probably they used a lot of accounts to access data that, in theory, is somewhat public. I mean, in an ideal world in which engineers have infinite time sure, they would have noticed, but I do investigations on platform apps for work and trust me, they miss a lot of more fundamental stuff.

ah no yeah, I agree, you can only experience the reflection. The Real punches you in the face but you don’t feel the punch, you just wake up on the floor without recollection of what happened.

There is a Real beyond our perceived reality, which is independent from observation, but doesn’t seep through the observation. Anything that reaches the conscious mind stops being objective. The Real is experienced only when our reality is shattered by an intervention of the Real. In scientific terms, the internal consistence of an epistemology doesn’t bring you close to the truth, but it just makes itself more resistant to the Real. Eventually the whole paradigm is shattered by something that cannot be encompassed in the epistemology and you can assume what was left outside is the Real intervening. Once the epistemology is consolidated, the bounds of what you can know are already set and are not objective, but depending on the epistemology itself, which is always partial.

spotify has a whole economy of bots signing up, uploading fake songs listened by other bots and earning lot of money in the process. I know several people living out of this. A little army of scraper bots is definitely not what they should be the most concerned about.

don’t attract individuals, attract entire groups of people. The idea of moving humans one by one when all of their friends are on centralized platforms will only attract lonely people, who won’t be able to promote the platform. The growth will eventually halt.

Move entire communities that are already connected: specific identities, followers of famous people (which should be onboard with the plan), specific subreddits and so on.

People don’t use forums anymore. Union organizing requires big numbers and being comfortable with being visible.

The URL shortener for sure could be addressed and I invite you to join and contribute to improve that part of the stack. Nonetheless, TWC is not a hacker space or a space for tech experts. You need to use the tools people already use and meet them where they are at. Using niche tools people are not familiar with introduces friction and barriers, that filter out people without tech skills, or without the attention and time to learn a new tool and incorporate it in their routines. Most tech workers are not programmers, remember that. Also people who are too privacy-focused and tech-focused tend to be bad organizers: union organizing implies risks and exposure, and you have to be comfortable with that, while privacy-focused people want to minimize individual risk by staying hidden. For sure privacy of your communication from the employer or the government plays an important role, because it might give sensitive information to your enemy, but if retaining privacy prevents you from having impact, it’s pointless to even start.

I’m part of TWC and the organization of this call and I’m Italian. There are different timezones but it’s obviously hard to include all of them. Including UTC wouldn’t help most people.

The very fact that there are two events for two distinct timezones doesn’t suggest there’s an attempt to reach out to a bigger crowd?

Because self-hosting adds complexity and friction, something that impact-oriented organizations might not be able to afford. TWC uses self hosting on more sensitive data anyway, just not on these tools.

The Global chapter of Tech Workers Coalition

The Session A time zone is good for Europeans too. Session B I guess could work for East Asia.

Why do you see this as USA-only?

No union in the world asks rates that high. You’ve been probably have been served some kind of management union busting material if you have ever seen a number that high. 3% is considered very high already.

Anyway AWU is not necessarily trying to bargain for higher wages, but they do work on better job security, better working environments, fairness against abuses, sexual harassment and similar stuff, and obviously they support the political work of anti-genocide groups within Google.

There’s always a reason to join a union if you’re a worker.

I would add exploitation of precarious workers both in the USA, Europe and third-world countries. That said, were you involved in Alphabet Workers Union? If not, why?

He’s a brown guy immigrated to NA and writing on a Marxist magazine. I don’t believe in reducing the personal to the biographical like Americans do, but also I think you can guess the answer to a few of your questions.

Also consider the form of these savings. Keeping everything in financial assets might be very dangerous on the very long term. The chances of a world war and/or a financial collapse of the West are relatively high and you don’t want a hyperinflation crisis to destroy all your savings. It happened in Germany, it is happening again in some parts of the world, it will happen again.

Where do you live? Have you considered you could start one? Or otherwise, just join an online chapter.

all good until the last part. If the choice is between starving and western interference, guess what everybody is going to pick?

There’s none. I have ML friends who went to jail in Iran for student organizing and they also say it’s all very underground and fragmented. Nonetheless, they also acknowledge that the vast majority of people in Iran is both anti-USA and anti-government so the terrain is potentially ripe.

But that’s exactly my point: it’s pointless to blame the people for just wanting to live a better life when the responsibility of offering a viable path to structural progressive change should come from leftist organizing. Nobody sane, and this excludes armchair tankies on the internet, will ever think “I should stay put and obedient because even though I’m starving, expressing dissent might reinforce problems in the geopolitical scenario”. Have you ever seen an angry or a starving human? That’s not how they think, and it’s definitely not how they should be thinking. You cannot blame and punish the vulnerable individual for the lack of collective political organizing. The only result would be that you would be marked as an enemy (and maybe an idiot) and your political agenda will be ignored, as it systematically happens to micro-ML purist parties.

Hello. Thanks for the input. We know most of these and TWC is globally under a process of moving towards a self-hosted infrastructure. We have a self-hosted url shortener, but we still have to structure a process to guarantee that the social media teams use them.

For the calls, Zoom is pretty entrenched in our infrastructure, but we plan to eventually replace it. For obvious reasons of hardware performance, we are keeping it as one of the last steps, because we often organize webinars with 100+ people, and our current infrastructure probably wouldn’t handle it with like a jitsi instance or similar.

The security party is also intended as a way to attract people who could bring more expertise on these topics into the infrastructure team and accelerate this transition.