Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

My life has improved immensely since deciding to invest my energy and interaction with others based more or less on the energy they present to me. I'll be sincere and show interest when it's there but if it's not reciprocated or I get aloof/weird vibes I pull back. I think people forget that the way they treat people actually kind of matters and they don't deserve your time/energy/care beyond the bare minimum if they aren't gonna be showing up in kind.

Anyway, you can check out the stuff from last year's Summer School (The Fediverse's academic conference) here:

https://summerschool.scholar.social/2022/

It's all super cool and I'm very proud of the work that everyone put into it

Academics have been on Fedi doing cool stuff for a while!

got myself a visual stim, as a treat

I've encountered quite a few people, over the span of my two decades in the tech sector, who were interested in labor organizing.

On the surface, I think collective organizing is incredibly powerful and has the potential to be very helpful. But I personally feel the the tech scene, in the US, cannot be saved by such efforts. Why?

Because the tech sector is already so skewed to exclude and eliminate the people who actually have the skills to sustain a successful organizing effort long term.

The tech sector is painfully white; the strategies of Black resistance and survival are largely unknown.

Indigenous skills of carrying and sharing knowledge, as well as building affinity and community in the long term, are nowhere to be found, with the white-supremacy-culture of urgency, writing-obsession, and disposability adding up to a constant loss and haphazard, artless reinvention of every conceivable wheel.

The Asian presence is subjected to a truly shitty amount of "model minority" oppression, meaning that solidarity is extremely hard to get, and Asian folx in US tech can't be asked to take all the risk - leaving a lot of that burden to white people with little to no concept of successful anti-racism.

Tech is also painfully male, which means that the skills of emotional labor and support are severely lacking.

Further still, the scene is incredibly hostile to both the poor and the disabled, which means the basic skills of resiliency in the face of material struggle are almost entirely absent from the tech world, too.

Every tech labor organizing effort I've seen has crumbled, sooner or later, because the members either recreate oppression in their collectives, have no clue how to survive together when not being paid, or both.

I'm not claiming I've seen the entirety of the situation, mind you; exceptions to this are totally possible. And I still think collective organizing is an important thing to explore for all of us.

But the tech sector in the US is not the place to look for successful examples.

me when im 20 minutes late to my accommodations appointment because the bus driver hit a fucking telephone pole

With every new technology, there are people whose livelihood is disrupted, who find that the word "progress" somehow doesn't include them. Technologists will always argue that it doesn't have to be like that, that technology can help everyone.

I honestly think that's true, but that raises the question: why is it that in our society, every new technology has left people behind, when that doesn't have to be true?

@RadicalGraffiti Reminded me of an old project a few of us theorycrafted a couple of decades ago. We noticed that whenever gentrifiers where about to destriy your working class neighborhood, the first thing they'd try and do is rename it. So near me the working class suburb of Coolbellup had a big chunk renamed "St Georges Estate" and then basically walled off, all the rental places threw out the old tenants, and the place was bulldozed and rebuilt. So we thought, Lets do it back to the fuckers! and came up with the idea of making up signs with names like "Shitsville" and "Stabbytown" and going into the rich peoples suburbs and putting them up and declaring we are renaming their nice white suburbs so the propery values would crash and working people could move in, since they couldnt live in working class suburbs anymore. A bit of political theatre, and it never went anywhere, but I still think it would be a fun campaign.

"I hope this graffiti lowers housing cost$"
Seen in Bellingham Washington

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world to stop making electronic devices out of transparent plastic.

Portugal tackles housing crisis:

- all unoccupied homes to be put on market at affordable prices
- government acts as estate agent
- capped rental price
- 'tourist apartments' prohibited

*Surprisingly, article is in Spanish*
https://elpais.com/economia/2023-02-17/portugal-revoluciona-su-politica-de-la-vivienda-prohibira-nuevos-pisos-turisticos-y-elimina-los-visados-de-oro.html

giving a catgirl a Linux image of an undocumented device from China is like giving a cat a ball of yarn

Following @ca_dmv_bot has taught me that every colour is a gang colour and every number is a gang number

Love how people will write up and publish a full academic paper about scholarly instances on Fedi and completely re-write the history to erase scholar.social, which has been on here since 2017

Autism Speaks came up again in interactions recently so I just wanted to make people aware again that it's an *incredibly* harmful organisation that caters to neurotypical's feelings rather than help ND people. TW for article: eugenics, abuse, harmful ideas, etc https://medium.com/artfullyautistic/autism-speaks-deception-eugenics-and-abuse-618cf65c094a

If you can’t afford a sidewalk, you can’t afford a road.

with Swarm/Foursquare feeling like they might be at risk of shutting down at any point, I keep wondering what an ActivityPub-based equivalent might look like

Foursquare have an incredible venue database, I think in part because they’ve done a great job at gamifying data entry- what if you could do the same against e.g., OpenStreetMap?