This is my late bun, Fred, who passed away in 2021 at the age of 12, pretty old for a rabbit. He was a jolly little guy, and rather naughty, but he always improved my mood. I hope he can do the same for you.
[#]RabbitsOfMastodon
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It's early yet, but tickets to the HOPE "Hackers On Planet Earth" conference this August are on sale now. By "hacker," they mostly mean the old-school definition of creatively hacking at something until it works.
I attended this conference virtually last year for the first time, and it's got an accessible humanities/geek vibe, but there's something for everyone.
https://www.hope.net/tickets.html
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I spent the weekend cobbling together some passable Ansible to build Tor web tunnels on six VPSes on six different international providers. I could have done manual installs, or used their existing Ansible, but I like to play with the tech.
Plus, there's a free Onion t-shirt involved. Never underestimate what a geek will do for a t-shirt.
https://blog.torproject.org/call-for-webtunnel-bridges/
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So I'm suggesting a solarpunk, open-sourcy, cooperative, web-based thing. Probably run from an existing FOSS cloud like OVHCloud, because cracking the cost of entry for a data center is... for later.
With the right group of people, the product or service is open to debate. A business needs to solve some problem out there, and there's lots to choose from.
I'm not asking for money, and I don't have much myself. I'd like to hear what people think, is any of this interesting at all?
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Anyway, I'd say the main problems I'd like to solve by controlling my workplace are:
Replace top-down control with direct democracy. I think five or seven like-minded geeks in a room could do some serious damage, especially a diverse group.
Ditch exploitation and competition for an egalitarian approach. This also includes customers.
No VC, no speculation on buyouts. We can't solve capitalism's problems by emulating it.
Stability. Run the company to thrive with steady growth.
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With all my random thoughts about worker cooperatives, I haven't specifically mentioned what I have in mind.
I'm kind of a broken-down old sysadmin. I can't really code and I'm not an engineer, and a lot of the intermediate-level type of work I was doing has been offshored or has morphed into SRE/DevOps.
Most of the clouds now in use, AWS, Azure, VMWare and even Google, are proprietary, and I loathe what they stand for.
[#]coop #workercoop #FOSS #Linux #sysadmin #genx
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The struggle went on for a time, with people dropping like flies. There was talk from the couple of starting the co-op just long enough to get a lucrative buyout from some corporation. It was no real departure from any part of the standard libertarian style of business.
I learned the hard way to avoid fads and hype as a basis for a new venture. There's a tendency for the wrong sort to show up, and for funding to vanish as quickly as it appeared. In the end, the whole thing was dropped.
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On a co-op list some years ago, a friendly man posted that he wanted to start a co-op to install solar panels, since he'd been laid off from his job doing same.
I was young enough that I could try a physical job like that, so I responded, along with several others.
As we met for chats and video calls, a couple from Oceanside emerged as a disruptive influence. They bought a domain and offered logins to the new space, effectively annexing the cooperation we'd started with.
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More about my past attempts to join or start a worker cooperative.
Most of my job searches over the last fifteen years have included at least a few polite emails to tech co-ops, all with equally polite refusals. I understand how it must feel to do all the work of a founder, and then have some dude show up looking for an easy route in, which he has not earned.
In the history of intentional communities, one major cause of failure has been poor screening of new people.
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Twenty years ago now, I was discontented with the well-paid but unstable and toxic nature of corporate IT work, so I went to to the library, where I discovered the existence of intentional communities and worker cooperatives, and this book.
https://archive.org/details/weownitstartingm00honi
It's from the 80s, but is a solid description of the Rochdale-style worker co-op which stays small to preserve direct democracy. There are many such guides online now, but this is almost canon.
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I saw an article recently which said that almost 400k IT people have been laid off in the last few years, and it's not clear when it may end, if at all.
As an unemployed middle-aged person, my only callbacks have come when I truncated my resume to 10 years ;-)
Anyway, with many in the same boat, it seems timely to talk about worker cooperatives. I've made attempts to join or start one in the past, which I'll post about.
I'm interested to know what others think about this.
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It's easy to get into a doom loop these days, but I honestly have faith in humanity. I'm not naive, we could all end up living in a real dystopia.
BUT
The darkness in the world is being deliberately caused by a tiny, greatly outnumbered fraction of the population to distract us from the truth, that if we can stop ourselves from being divided and learn to cooperate instead, their time in power will end.
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In his book, "The Demon-haunted World," the late Carl Sagan discusses how humans tend to accept things without considering evidence, with crop circles as one example (I sheepishly admit to have been taken in by this one).
His premise, which extends beyond scientific inquiry, is to remain open to new information, lest your biases cause you to miss the truth, but also to maintain a healthy skepticism with everything, based on what you can prove with objective facts.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-demon-haunted-world-science-as-a-candle-in-the-dark-ann-druyan/6315853?ean=9780345409461
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Scientists, man. We need them.
YouTube link to video entitled, "How to Counter Disinformation: Communication Strategies, Best Practices, and Pitfalls to Avoid" from the Union of Concerned Scientists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsEi5hRQ6Vw
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Found these on the subway.
https://archive.org/details/politicsofnonvio0000unse
https://archive.org/details/politicsofnonvio0000shar_b0o8
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I could never say it better than Huxley.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/07/26/aldous-huxley-mike-wallace-1958-interview/
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Anyway, I've set my post expiration to remove everything by the end of the month. It seems necessary in a world where my free speech today might be illegal next year.
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I had complex emotions the last time this person was elected, but I'd forgotten the puzzlement I felt. I ask myself how someone could make a winning platform out of something like "Bringing polio back again."
Then I remember the oligarch-funded Cambridge Analytica in 2016. They microtargeted people using their psych profiles in just the right swing state counties to push the numbers over. Card-counting, basically, perhaps AI-enhanced this time to fit each person's specific biases.
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On the old birdsite, I'd follow many different kinds of accounts, some I disagreed with very much, some I even suspected were right-wing or foreign influencers. I do the same with my reading, there are no limits.
But here in the fedi, if I understand it correctly, my follows bring their posts to my server's federated timeline, so I've started to quietly unfollow anyone spreading propaganda to lessen their voices.
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I once went down to the Occupy Los Angeles camp at the city hall, to see what they were about. I had my corporate drone haircut and Motorola pager/leash. My wife was with me.
A big guy in a skull mask started yelling at us and acting in a hostile fashion. I guess we didn't look lefty enough for him. My wife felt unsafe so we went home.
It's important to be open-minded about who our allies might be.
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text/gemini
