Gnosticism is by definition the epitome of duality. That said, conflict with a reactionary entity doesn’t imply you’re not reactionary. Russia and Ukraine are at war with each other and they are both very reactionary, becoming even worse due to the needs produced by such conflict.

Also, hackers tend to hold libertarian (in the European sense) values and that’s how they pick their targets for direct action. When I say they are reactionary, they are reactionary in effect, not in intent. That makes them even more problematic, because it’s not immediately obvious what’s the problem.

It would be quite a long argument, but I suggest TechGnosis by Erik Davis and this article: https://www.are.na/block/24206425

tl;dr: hacker culture is grounded in gnostic, individualistic californian hippie culture, and shares root with what is now the dominant, reactionary ideology of big tech moguls, ketamine cryptocolonialists, business white supremacists. One key tenet of hacker culture is the power of the individual super-human brain power to reshape entire societies through the production of disruptive technology. Mr. Robot tv series is one such example of said mindset. It preaches the superiority of the world of minds and the virtual over the material. The material is subject to the virtual and the virtual is where the real stuff is happening, where there’s a real confrontation of power (the hacker vs the system, disruptors vs established businesses, out-of-the-box thinkers vs corporate drones). This mimics gnostic beliefs very closely. It is reactionary because it is individualistic, because it erases material conditions and collective action, but it also just operates from such a simplified worldview that it is impossible to adhere to if you have a very basic understanding of disciplines like sociology, history or politics. It’s just not how the world works.

I have a few. I’m not the kind of person that says controversial things to attract attention, but I also don’t refrain from putting them out there.

A selection of the ones I use in my political activity:

• knowing things doesn’t change things
• work should be abolished
• atheism and rationalism are a scourge on the ability of the Left to reach people
• hacker culture is intrinsically gnostic and reactionary

Some others:

• suicidal and self-harming people should be listened to by understanding and validating the motivations behind their desire to hurt or kill themselves, even entertaining with them their own plans. Anything else would likely put a wedge between the two of you that will prevent from addressing the causes and ultimately do what’s good for them.
• mathematics is just narrative with rules/arbitrary opinions with rules
• nurses, doctors, teachers and other professions of care attract the worst psychopaths because they are put in charge of vulnerable people. On top of that they are by default perceived as caregivers, so it’s harder for them to raise suspicion of doing fucked up stuff.

Edit: people down voting in a thread about controversial opinions must be very very intelligent

We: Italians, Spanish, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Vietnamese, South Asians, Japanese.

Barbarians: everybody else, especially the French

You clearly haven’t met a Southern European. We divide the world in civilized ass washers and uncivilized smelly barbarians

I use Notion+Notion Calendar for this and I delegate to it a lot of stuff: bureaucracy, booking the barber, changing the bedsheets, all my work, birthdays, etc etc. How can people trust their brain with more than two or three items is unfathomable to me. I mean, when I was younger I could keep in mind a dozens upcoming appointments and go through them every few hours to make sure I wouldn’t miss anything, but as soon as your routine is disturbed by work stuff, it’s impossible.

you have no fucking clue how brittle systems like electronics production, or oil supply are. USA, from a systemic point of view, is the most coupled and fragile production system in the world except maybe some micro-nation in the middle of the ocean.

mastercard sends your transaction data live to banks. They sell your data to third parties for marketing, profiling and the likes. Credit score is the least of your problems.

I know because I developed a system, in a major European bank, enriching their transaction data with mastercard data for live, predatory marketing.

I’m not American and I don’t even vote. Get off the internet and touch grass pls.

Quitting the for-profit sector for political and moral reasons. Not easy and it’s still a struggle, but I keep going.

Join Tech Workers Coalition then. https://techworkerscoalition.org/

Union organizing should be done across departments. Anyway software developers are doing a lot of organizing and unionizing, exactly because they have more secure positions. AWU, Kickstarter, NYT, Grindr, and many others are almost entirely office workers, many of which are software developers. Software developers are tech workers: drawing lines doesn’t help anybody and historically has always been to the detriment of the workers movement. Software developers start organizing when they stop being software developers and become tech workers.

Also FYI: I’ve been a software developer for a decade and I mostly organize software developers that, if anything, are overrepresented in “tech workers” spaces, to the point where we have to put rules like “don’t talk about git, it scares the workers” to prevent the spaces to become cliquey.

What do you mean? The USA has a lot of momentum and a lot of tech companies are unionizing, many more than anywhere else. It’s on mainstream newspapers every other day

I’m a union organizer in tech. I’m Italian, but I live in Germany and I do interact a lot with American organizers.

In Germany, most organizing is effectively cleansed of political identity and needs to be conducted in a very sanitized environment to be appealing to workers. It’s also very very focused on the legal aspects.

Americans are way more technical about the whole of it: more methodologies, more processes, more tools, it’s a game of numbers.

Italians…, well, let’s say the unions there deserve the hate. Not because they are particularly corrupted or conservative (which they are), but because they have no fucking clue what they are doing. They are much slower than their foreign counterparts, they have no resources, they have very little coordination and no interest in getting better. Like many things in Italy, they are slowly sinking in the quicksand. The organizers on the ground they are often under prepared and they have no concept of methodology: they know their legal stuff, but they believe that building momentum in the workplace is just a matter of identifying the right arguments and deliver the right speech at the worker assemblies. Basically they rely on luck, workers motivation and 50 years old processes. They also have no operational coordination on a regional or national level. People from the same union working on the same category don’t know or talk to each other unless they work in the same physical office.

Federated software, for most people, is still entangled in a competition with mainstream social media, so the biological, psychological and social implications of the attention economy are still there. First and foremost, because they have to attract users away, and if they are boring, only people motivated by duty or politics will move and that’s a microscopic percentage. You cannot offer a pbj to a heroin addict and hope they will quit. If anything, the federated social media do not offer enough interesting content.

What you’re questioning though is somehow intrinsic to the nature of social media, especially when contrasted with social networks. Is the consumption of “content” (derogatory) in itself a problem? I would say yes, but then the solution is to ditch social media entirely. That’s a shortcoming of federated software’s (lack of) political grounding: they expect that by liberating data, they will liberate people. Such a thing never happened: software doesn’t alter social or productive relations, it just grows within the boundaries allowed by existing social structures.

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Commenting with no clue what people are talking about

Right now the whole model of generative AI and in general LLM is built on the assumption that training a machine learning model is not a problem for licenses, copyright and whatever. Obviously this is bringing to huge legal battles and before their outcome is clear and a new legal pratice or specific regulations are established in EU and USA, there’s no point discussing licenses.

Also licenses don’t prevent anything, they are not magic. If small or big AI companies feel safe in violating these laws or just profit enough to pay fines, they will keep doing it. It’s the same with FOSS licenses: most small companies violate licenses and unless you have whistleblowers, you never find out. Even then, the legal path is very long. Only big corporate scared of humongous lawsuits really care about it, but small startups? Small consultancies? They don’t care. Licenses are just a sign that says “STOP! Or go on, I’m a license, not a cop”