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[...] These images, unreal, fixed, always alike, filling all my nights and days, differentiated this period in my life from those which had gone before it (and might easily have been confused with it by an observer who saw things only from without, that is to say who saw nothing), as in an opera a melodic theme introduces a novel atmosphere which one could never have suspected if one had done no more than read the libretto, still less if one had remained outside the theatre counting only the minutes as they passed. [...]
[...] seeing on the boulevards that the chestnut-trees, though plunged in a glacial atmosphere that soaked through them like water, were none the less beginning, punctual guests, arrayed already for the party and admitting no discouragement, to shape and chisel and curve in its frozen lumps the irrepressible verdure whose steady growth the abortive power of the cold might hinder but could not succeed in restraining [...]
My education was still not complete. After the school on the island where being happy was the first rule, a last college smoothed out my seventeen years. A domestic management school [...] I was to learn to keep house, to cook, to bake cakes. I had already learnt a bit of embroidery, at eight. It was now expected that I prepare myself to become a housewife. They found a school near a lake, Lake Zug, renowned for its cherry flans.
made me chuckle
Now it's been years since we said our long goodbyes. I'm not any smarter. I just watched my first company go down in flames and I'm starting a new one. I have to talk to lawyers for bankruptcy in the mornings and lawyers for setting up a new firm in the second. And I know that if you were here, you'd be laughing at me and telling me what a sha gua I am for doing stupid shit twice in a row and expecting it to somehow work in the second time.
I look at the Hong Kong skyline that is my desktop background sometimes and I wonder how you're doing. If your 40-year-old engaged boss is still trying to finger you in the back of taxicabs, if you're still agonizing because you kinda like him but he's engaged and 15 years older than you. If you still want to webcam with me, even though we're both people that no longer hold each other in our hearts any more. If, when you send me those little heart-filled e-mail cards on my birthday, you really mean it.
Which pains me. But I still trust you. Because you were the one girl that liked me when I had nothing, so you're the one girl I can trust once I have everything.
And I am foolish. Maybe that's why I liked you. Because you were everything I never had, and so you became everything I ever wanted, and now you're everything I'm never going to get.
And the greatest tragedy of all: I wanted to make enough cash so that a smart girl like you would not have to degrade herself to the finance-world burnout [...]
But it all didn't work out, did it? You left too soon, I ended up with other girls that made me realize how... decent of a human being you were. That made me realize how much of a complete chump I myself am. And now I'm set back another two years, another two years farther away from holding you again, another two years closer to missing out on you for the second time, as you slip on a wedding ring to some jerkoff playboy while I type uselessly on an online forum twelve fucking time zones away
In the months after the election, the media focused on tech leadership. Who did or did not trek to Trump Tower? How much diversity of opinion was there in this room of white people? How far would they Lean In to fascism? Who cares?
We focus on the rank and file, because the reality is that meaningful change to the system that brought us Trump is not going to come from the people whom that system made billionaires. Meaningful change must come from below--from the workers who write the code that generates those billions to the workers whose service makes their coding possible.
The current arrangement might seem natural and immutable. But, as one of our favorite futurologists once said: so did the Divine Right of Kings.
yessss
referring to Ursula K Le Guin
The Tech Workers Coalition doesn't see tech workers as a special kind of worker. But we understand that we have a strategic position with regard to our place in production that we can leverage to stand in solidarity with other workers--not only with the service workers who work as security guards and bus drivers in our workplaces, but with all workers.
The dominant approach among well-intentioned people in tech when faced with a problem is: I can build an app that’ll fix that. And sure, technology is awesome and most of us work in tech because we find building tools to solve problems interesting. But the structural problems we have in society won’t be fixed by an app. We’ll need to think a lot bigger than that to solve these problems.
A different approach is: tech work is crucial to every industry at this point, and it’s done by a fairly small group of people. You can shut down quite a lot with a relatively few number of workers if you collectively decide to.
quoting Kristen Sheets
The problem is that we don't have many levers of control over big tech companies. The traditional stuff doesn't work. Usually, if a company is doing something a lot of people think is unethical, you can boycott them. You can't really boycott Google or Facebook. You're not their customer to begin with. Their customers are advertisers and publishers. Also, they're monopolies. They're centralized and they benefit from network effects. Boycotting them means cutting yourself off from the online world. People just won't do it in numbers.
And shareholder revolts won’t work because these companies are structured so that the founders always have full voting rights. Zuckerberg is going to run Facebook no matter if he only has one share. That’s how it’s written. As for the media, the press isn’t going to say anything bad about Facebook or Google because those are the main outlets for journalism right now.
That really just leaves the employees. Tech employees have an outsize force because they’re very expensive to hire and it takes a long time to train people up. Even for very skilled workers, it takes months and months to become fully productive at a place like Google because you have to learn the internal tooling, you have to learn how things are done, you have to learn the culture. It’s a competitive job market and employee morale is vital. If people start fleeing your company, it’s hard to undo the damage.
So tech workers are a powerful lever. And knowing that fact, it seems unwise not to use the best tools at our disposal. The point isn’t to improve our economic well-being, but to pursue an ethical agenda.
Maciej on why a tech workers union is important
There's long been an ambition that the internet should be about democracy. This goes back to the beginning—to geeks swapping code, to open protocols that let users post whatever. But notice that when people in tech talk about "democratizing" some tool or service, they almost always mean just allowing more people to access that thing. Gone are the usual connotations of democracy: shared ownership and governance. This is because the internet's openness has rarely extended to its underlying economy, which has tended to be an investor-controlled extraction game based on surveillance and abuse of vulnerable workers.
Trump and Steve Jobs have different aesthetics—black turtleneck versus golden combover—but their bedrock assumptions about how the world works are essentially the same. It has been convenient for some tech CEOs to adopt apparently progressive politics, because that has been a way to obtain the immigration policies, educated workforce, and general goodwill they need to consolidate their power. But they're not programmed, so to speak, to care about democratic process. Fascism—in the classical sense of a strong-arm alliance between government and industry—aligns much more neatly with the culture of startup bros and venture capital and unicorns. We can already see the CEOs starting to line up behind Peter Thiel in their embrace of Trumplandia. It is a kind of homecoming. It probably feels quite liberating for some.