Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Anyone know of a good IRC client for the #blind? I wanna use IRC.

"The project of Gender is one that was/is explicitly deployed as a tool of the settler colonial project on the land mass we know as the 'Americas' including 'Canada,' forcibly deployed onto indigenous nations in an attempt to eradicate indigeneity (nokizaru 4-5). This was done due to the fact that a vast majority of indigenous nations not only structured their socialites in non-patriarchal makeups, but specifically had conceptions of gender that did not at all correlate with the European model (Lugones 25). "

-- Chris Coles, "Paradigmatic Bio-Logic: Against Biology and Towards Translife." p. 28

"To be clear, when I say that Gender is inherently a violent structure I do not mean to say that gender identity in the abstract is bad. Rather, I mean to articulate the way in which a dominant conception of Gender has been created, deployed, and enforced in such a way that it demands people fit into specific gender-identities that they did not determine. Thus when we critique and call for the abolishment of capital-G Gender, that does not mean the eradication of gender identities that exist outside of said paradigm like the Hijra, Two-Spirit, Fa'afafine, etc. but rather for the destruction of the system that makes said identities unintelligible."

-- Chris Coles, "Paradigmatic Bio-Logic: Against Biology and Towards Translife." p.28

have The Talk with your friends:

no, artificial intelligence isn't real now, nor is it just around the corner
we need laws to prevent capitalists using LLMs to try to circumvent labor laws; we don't need laws to stop "rogue AI" because that's sci-fi bullshit with absolutely no bearing on reality
no, "ai" is not "inevitable" -- the bullshit word extruders that are being positioned as the next big thing right now are snake oil garbage, and not even profitable snake oil garbage, and there's no path to develop them into anything else because that's just how they work
if you hear someone talking about how "ai" is going to change everything, treat them the same way you'd treat a scientologist talking about whatever the fuck scientologists believe in: it is bullshit cult nonsense for marks and rubes
remind them to ponder the question of "cui bono" -- who benefits from the narrative that "ai" is the "next big thing"? the answer: mostly filthy rich american fascists, filthy rich chip manufacturers, filthy rich data center operators, and filthy rich silicon valley entrepreneurs

do your part to counter bullshit fucking propaganda from capitalist scumbags 👍

Edit: this seems to have resonated with a lot of people and I've rejected a lot of nonsense replies or people being contrarian and annoying I don't care if you disagree! Write your own post about it! :')

Alchemy is only ever going to get better and it is improving every year.

Soon Alchemy will make goldminers obsolete.

I think a misunderstanding is that people want to fight "scraping" or "automated systems". But my feeling is that the issue is with the _purpose_ of the scraping: It's not "that person is scraping my site" it's "that person wants to use my work to train their slop machine". The issue is the SLOP machine with all the negative externalities they have.
And that is a path worth exploring (that I have similarly argued for code): We want to contribute to the commons but there are specific uses that go against our values.
https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/114754224933740471

Went to two frontend conferences in as many days, and learned a lot; not all of it what the presenters hoped I'd take away:

https://infrequently.org/2025/06/conferences-clarity-and-smokescreens/

Is Linux accidentally giving itself an unfair reputation for being difficult?

Helped a non-techy person on the phone get their wifi working on a Linux laptop, we solved it by them pressing the physical flight mode button and then toggling the wireless option in the GUI. Pretty easy, as easy as Mac or Windows.

BUT... when I initially looked this problem up on a search engine, the first page of results involved the command line and scary paragraphs of CLI text about hardware and drivers.

If this non-techy person had looked this up, they would have seen scary CLI options as top results, and been intimidated away from Linux.

#Linux

last time it kept overheating while trying to compile the kernel, and we had to hold it in front of the air conditioner for like an hour to get it to finish. this time around we should be able to skip that part by using the single-core trick we recently figured out for the laptop, so that's good

as we leave gpn and its lice jokes behind us and look ahead to a long summer full of more chaos events, let's all remember that infectious disease is a community issue. lice can't buy gulasch-genusspakets and wear those shitty wristbands; they don't care what city they're in or who organized the event that brought new people together and prime new louse real estate within crawling distance.

if lice were transmitted at gpn, the same will happen at other events – sure, scale might matter, but lets not pretend that this stuff stops when the jokes do.

when we share space and closeness in our bodies, we also share responsibility. this is, indeed, the point: what brings you joy brings me joy, and what hurts you hurts me; what makes you sick makes me sick, and what helps you helps me. we run on the same biological substrate; we share similar vulnerabilities, and similar desires; and when we acknowledge this by exchanging mutual care and joy in our embodied forms, let's reaffirm that shared responsibility, too.

take care.

A while back when I discussed plastic pollution in my newsletter Talking Climate, I said the most important way we can cut it is not by recycling (only 8% is actually recycled) but rather by advocating for plastic bans where we live.

And now, guess what - there’s peer-reviewed evidence this works!

Find the article here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp9274

Part of me wish I could rub the martyr culture text on the face of every anarchist group I've been that imploded because someone shouted in a discussion once, of every forest occupation that ostracised a combative comrade to this day because she made an opsec mistake once, every shelter who expelled a trans woman of colour into homelessness because she kicked a door in frustration once. (Actual examples.) This left scene where everything is reduced to individuals, perpetually evaluated for their worth under threat of pigeonholing like some sort of gig economy app, every isolated individual left off to fend for themself, simultaneously on the edge with chronic anxiety over the risk of being swiped left at any point, and reproducing the same carceral logic like so many Diogenes assholes wandering the streets with smug self-satisfaction, "I'm searching for a comrade who is not problematic".

But that's me internalising the German way of being; my desire to go show the Germans that this is bad. To point fingers and call out, call out to--who? To what? It's me doing what Sara in the interview calls the politics of complaint, the politics of "should be". The question is how to build autonomy from them. Tierra y liberdad.

> The standards that women [in the autonomous structures] come up for ourselves—because they're connected to our analysis of our, like, actual conditions, to what is necessary in order to, to win, to progress, you know?—those standards are often higher, actually. We end up needing to ask more of ourselves [than we ask of the men], not less. Whereas I find that in the USA, many times the approach to gender is like, well I'm more oppressed, then I should expect more of them... But this doesn't make sense. Like, if the men were going to free us, they would have done that yesterday. You know? We surely been complaining about it long enough.
> …And I think this is true for every axis of oppression. The person who holds the power is not going to give it to you, so autonomy is the answer, in this revolution.

I've talked of this before, of being abandoned by every single antifa organisation I knew of when the nazis came bang on the door, of me myself responding to a call for help in the face of violence only to find I was the only (1) single antifa to take up the call. Earlier I said that, if you want someone you can count on when the boots come, forget the German anarchists, go organise with the Kurds, the Zapatistas—I knew the Kurds were for real when the first heval I ever talked to offered to babysit my kids for months so I could visit Rojava, *within one hour of meeting me*; I think I know a grand total of 0 German comrades who would take family responsibilities for a fallen comrade for the cause, even a comrade they know for years, let alone a stranger. Now that I've been organising with Palestinians and their supporters of Arab background, I find the same communal spirit, the same commitment. I talked to a single Palestinian immigrant I met by chance about fascist threats to a place; they gave me their contact to call for backup; by the time the Nazis came scout they found the space occupied by over two dozen immigrants ready to throw down. Needless to say, the attackers were easy to dissuade.

When we tried to thank them they said "we thank *you*, for being in the struggle."

And each time I have to think, do I *have* to organise with parties and leadership cults to have this? Do I have to organise with tendencies so distant from my sex-gender politics? (Though these days, tragicomically, I feel safer dressing slutty along Muslims than around white feminists—the last person to condemn me for how I dress wasn't a religious conservative but a transgender anarchafeminist, while for every Middle-Easterner I ever met, us being on the same side is the determining factor.) Is it really impossible for anarchists to have community? But I know it's not, because I have read how it was in Spain, in Korea, in the Makhnovshchina or the Paris commune.

You have to think, *why* it is that instead of a martyr culture, we have a callout culture? These are social problems created by social conditions, it's not possible to individualise them. Something I've found out through experience is that the armchair criticism that Sara mentions, where some First World leftist looks at a revolution done in the Third World among war on all sides, hunger, literal genocide, only to go ah but they're too hierarchical, I heard the leader hits on women, they're fighting with a NATO army, etc., and then wash off their hands—this problem is literally invisible to First World people. They really cannot *conceive* of what it is, to be in conditions of material necessity. The absurdity of a beneficiary of colonialism engaging in the most damaging social structure of all every day, by keeping their jobs and consumption patterns and comfy walled lives, pointing fingers at people actually pulling off an anti-State revolution to go, oh but they're too patriarchal, not socialist enough etc.—this is a nonfactor, it means nothing. They are living in the world of activism, where the enemies are -isms. Which is to say, they do not know yet what it is like to have an enemy. So they will treat a man reproducing misoginy on your side as equivalent to an enemy, to be handled the same way. (Sara, paraphrased: "We only ever criticise comrades. We don't criticise enemies. What would be the point?")

In the worst case, these privilege-tinted lenses are bound to shatter when the enemy is at the door. But it sure would be cool if we could get our crap together before the shooting starts, so that we don't end up in "a situation in which the special forces break into your house and you need to take decisive actions, but your arsenal consists only of punk lyrics, veganism, and 100-year-old books" ("War and Anarchists: Anti-Authoritarian Perspectives in Ukraine").

Sometimes anarchist friends tell me that the Kurds or the Palestinians get to have community because they have the bond of nationalism, and we can't rely on that so we're condemned to individualism. But that's a gross misunderstanding of how it works, born out of ignorance and social distance; of how deeply these movements are steeped in internationalism. (European anarchists will tell me things like "this is not my struggle to claim, I cannot wear a kufiyah that would be Orientalist appropriation", meanwhile Palestinians are like "we are all Palestinians here! every one of us is Palestinians! here put on this kufiyah I want to show you to my family in Palestine", then recording on cellphone: "look at her she's my second daughter now", about someone she met the same week... Compare this to Sara's comments on her thought process after being told that the Rojava revolution "belongs to everyone".)