let's go do some STEM activities!

if you imagine that all contactees at the start of your marketing funnel suffer 1¢ in hassle when processing each communication, what is the externalized cost of your campaign?

#SamKriss on Israel/Palestine, simultaneously perhaps the best and truest thing i’ve read on the conflict, but also in its way one of the darkest and most nihilistic because, absent some sudden plague of bilateral paralytic shame, is there any way forward from here? https://samkriss.substack.com/p/against-the-brave

“The average German worker has ten extra weeks of free time every year (400 hours) compared U.S. workers. Got freedom, much?” @SteveRoth https://angrybearblog.com/2024/02/is-more-work-better-think-again

before the assembly line, there was the plantation. division of labor, “deskilling”, surveillant control were already well developed.

“free”, as opposed to enslaved, labor presented an opportunity and a challenge. “free”-dom cld legitimate the organization of surplus value extraction as an outcome of worker “choice”, rather than the slave’s coercion. but organizing a similar efficiency of extraction presented a sociotechnological problem

see @Mer__edith https://logicmag.io/supa-dupa-skies/origin-stories-plantations-computers-and-industrial-control/ ht @andrewhinton

i mean, if you can get away with it, it was God’s will, right?

think of a UBI as a universal strike fund.

alignments and outcomes:

working class+professional class ⇒ social democracy

professional class+plutocrats ⇒ liberal plutocracy (“neoliberalism”)

working class+plutocrats ⇒ fascism

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( repost of a 2019 twitter post, just to have it somewhere less useless. original https://x.com/interfluidity/status/1183867514389843968 )

@admitsWrongIfProven getting involved in governance! and there’s not just a scalar space in which one ruler or none are extremes. governance can be by institutions rather than by autocrats or oligarchs, and there is a broad range of possible institutions that aren’t on any number line of how-many-rule.

@admitsWrongIfProven which is another way of saying the public requires governance, because absent governance there is only a brutal game of thrones to usurp power.

anarchists may wish we had a solution to this other than someone, or, better still, some set of responsive and permeable institutions, winning the prize.

we all may wish for a lot of things.

rather than respond to their noise, we must learn to sing our own song.

together our harmony can drown out their cacophony.

“We don’t mean ill, I’m sure. Could it be a bad line of code? Have we tried turning ourselves off and on again? It’s a hell of a time for us to go on the fritz, though, because while our government beeps and blinks and turns in circles, a decent world order built by our grandparents’ blood, toil, tears and sweat is being supplanted by a Hobbesian hell of war, terror, savagery, and starvation.” @claireberlinski https://open.substack.com/pub/claireberlinski/p/for-all-our-sakes-wake-up

if you agree we are living out a pretty stupid timeline, it’s time to work on governance.

are they saying they prefer occupational sex to recreational sex?

“Denaturalization and Asylum in Interwar Europe” by #EdWalker https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/02/21/denaturalization-and-asylum-in-interwar-europe/

on the theory that the science of contemporary politics is maximally trolling the other side, i would point out that Hunter is not so old.

Biden ‘24

@admitsWrongIfProven it’s the imagined people shrieking at you that makes writing text so psychologically difficult, yes.

@scott the key is always when there’s a greenfield, near or far, find a way to build dense mixed-use. but that’s not what “the market” will do, for a variety of reasons, and SF’s municipal government has been reactive and risk-averse in destructive ways. (SOMA, such an opportunity, such miserable urbanism.) our problems in general are governance problems.

@exchgr often abusive ones...