uspol
Intercept article on political organizing in my neck of the woods https://theintercept.com/2018/09/15/jess-king-pennsylvania-lancaster-stands-up/
Found an excuse to start learning #golang again...
I'm involved in an app called Wobbly that will help workers to mobilize according to #IWW principles.
The founder @KingMob has himself been a Deliveroo courier, and his experiences sparked the idea for the app.
We seek to make the app into a multistakeholder coop when it's launched.
Everyone is welcome to join our discord group (https://discord.gg/kZaXpu), also feel free to message me.
We're looking for a #graphicdesigner, so please retoot!
Here's an article about it:
http://www.notesfrombelow.org/article/an-introduction-to-wobbly
social.coop meta, request for feedback
@nev I've been thinking that the challenge we're having cohering a narrative to convey to people who were not in the moment is itself symptomatic of structural issues.
Because of the lack of formal delegated governance authority, any "official" narrative must be agreed to by a majority of the whole membership, and by 90% if anyone blocks. Which makes this work of listening that you're undertaking super important.
Thank you for doing it. ๐ #SocialCoop
David Ackley's ideas about computing can be seen as anarchistic. The von Neumann architecture is the centrally-governed state; memory is passive, incapable of doing anything without executive action from the CPU. But this doesn't scale and isn't robust. It's optimized for speed.
Ackley says we have to forego determinism in order to build robust, scalable computations. But it seems that this requires a radically new conception of what it means to compute or even to program.
social.coop meta, request for feedback
So, if for nothing else than to help people learn from our mistakes, I'd like to start compiling accounts of the unravelling/failure of social.coop.
I will be reaching out to particular people over the next few days, but if anyone out there left/chose not to join social.coop for Reasons and would be willing to talk about it (anonymously if you want), please DM.
Please boost for visibility.
#SocialCoop has been upgraded to mastodon 2.5
You can read the full paper here: https://pepso.ca/documents/the-generation-effect-full-report.pdf
Executive summary: https://pepso.ca/documents/the-generation-effect-executive-summary.pdf
@brainblasted When people ask me questions, before I answer, I like to remind myself that *nobody* knows everything, and I am ignorant of many things and always will be (despite my best efforts). Anyway, I get more joy in sharing knowledge than lording knowledge over people. I wish everyone shared that feeling. :/
> The usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness.
https://katherine.cox-buday.com/blog/2018/07/18/the-utility-of-a-cup/
transparency in work
I'm not a worker who blindly accepts tasks. They have to make sense to me. I require transparency.
One way for management to get around this is to obfuscate the source of nonsense. "Our experts say X, so we must do Y."
I'm calling their bluff. My experiment is to comply, knowing that doing Y will go poorly. But playing dumb, as they wish me to be. Then they can deal with the consequences themselves.
Selfishness can be an externally imposed constraint.
nurturance
Suppose that the essence of our movement is nurturance as opposed to strictness. Care for others as opposed to discipline. Empathizing and identifying with them rather than preferring that they be self-sufficient.
Many of us are immensely privileged. But privilege is relative. Some of our friends are much less privileged than us.
Being nurturant often entails giving up privileges. It means sacrificing freedom to care for others. It means prizing their well-being above personal gain.
moral systems
For those interested by my recent ranting about moral systems, you ought to watch this one-hour talk by Lakoff, which explains it in much more depth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f9R9MtkpqM
I suspect that the conflict involving Federation policy can be understood from this perspective.
tech co-ops // starting a tech coop
o h s h i t
> A Document to Help You Start a Tech Cooperative
from the folks at feeltrain: