Many of my direct friends lost their job for doing it. Look up “exposing Zalando”.

Here in Berlin it’s a regular occurrence that any exhibition, cultural or political event criticizing Israel receives at the very list a threatening call and a visit from the police. Sometimes it escalates into vandalism or violence, sometimes with getting raided by the police, sometimes with defunding if it’s a public thing.

If they silenced Albanese and banned Varoufakis, they can silence anybody.

You might have missed a lot of news about Germany. They passed a new law that suspends freedom of speech when it’s against Israel. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-passes-controversial-antisemitism-resolution/a-70715643

There has been plenty of extra-judicial retaliation, i.e. against Francesca Albanese or Oyoun, and we got close to having 4 cases of extra-judicial extradictions without an accusation against pro-Palestine protesters, which a judge eventually blocked.

It’s an elixir skeleton that runs a system of modules you can combine (just with configs) or that you can extend by adding new modules.

The skeleton does the bare minimum and the modules contain all the logic. It’s not a no-code tool (that would be astounding, but doesn’t exist yet), you still need to write some config files (flavours) or write some elixir.

It’s a toolkit to build federated apps, with a social media+blogging+collaboration platform built on top of it.

I followed a similar trajectory, leaving the tech sector to pursue politically-motivated jobs. Am I locked-in? Probably, my linkedin is full of agitprop. Do I care? No, the world is on fire, there’s no coming back. I get to the end of the month, I’m doing important stuff, fuck careers, there are more important things.

The person I know that got fired is even more gung-ho than me so I can imagine they don’t care either.

From what I know, no. It’s full of more politically-aligned workplaces, like NGOs and research groups, that crave politically-motivated people with tech skills. I know personally one of the fired workers that went on to do a PhD right after being fired.

user research is a common design and marketing term to mean “identify product consumption and interface preferences”

In Italy they are probably above 90% of the workforce. They are the defining form of IT sector. In the USA way less, and also individual contractors are legal, while in Italy they are not, so there’s a whole issue of illicit dynamics (“body rental”) which in the USA are equally a problem, but they are not illicit and nobody cares about them.

Shitty, exploitative consultancies exist wherever there’s an IT sector, but in certain countries, like Italy, Brazil, or Romania, they are the only form and this shapes the union landscape a lot. Romenia proves that this is not a blocker to achieve high union density though.

I’m far from being a doomer. I just don’t believe technology will save us. There are better ways.

open source startups are still part of the same ecosystem that fuels big tech. Big tech, being more powerful, can capture commons very easily and that’s true for the vast majority of open-source code. The very concept of open-source was conceived by a person with the same ideological and cultural background of the tech oligarchs now in power.

yeah and it does harm. Any technology amputated a part of us. The point is deciding if it’s worth the cost.

yes. That’s how Mussolini and Hitler got into power.

After the USAID thing I called it this morning: Before the end of march the U.S. is a dictatorship in all but name.

You’re optimistic. Yarvinists are openly advocating for dictatorship.

USAID was a probing attack, gauge the reactions, develop plans, figure out how to do it better with the next department. You don’t start with Homeland Security, the CIA, or the FBI - that’s the final part.

Well, debatable. Purging the secret services first is always a great idea when you’re doing a coup.

You should start the union

if it happens, or simply if you get more involved into Romanian unions, reach out to me. I organize events to connect tech workers organizing interionationally, so we might do something.

Go for it. If you want to look for a very good example of union communication, look up “More Perfect Union”. Very American, but it shows a way to bring union news to people in a cool way.

Pretty much anywhere outside the USA, the communication of tech workers unionizing is pretty much absent and expecially news about it. This is a big deal, but it doesn’t say much about the actual penetration of unions in a given sector. It’s a complex topic, but I explain it with the fact that the topic is pretty much uninteresting, unless it’s a well-known brand is unionizing. Since most famous tech companies are American, there’s enough mass of news there to actually push media outlets to cover news.

In Italy, where there are very few “well-known” IT companies, the topic is completely absent, to the point where IT union organizers from a city don’t know about big wins by other IT unions organizers from another city. Nonetheless the narrative is not the thing, and there can be big impacts that become visible to the general public only after sociological studies.

So, long-story short, the fact you never heard about SITT doesn’t say much about its effectiveness, just about their ability to communicate.

Are you aware that Romanian IT sector has the highest rate of unionization of any IT sector in the world? SITT is a case study studied all over the world. https://transform-network.net/blog/interview/the-romanian-it-workers-labour-union-showed-that-everyone-can/

It might not be the sexiest, most modern radical union, but it is a case of success with numbers to show. Maybe you can start from there.

most cursed take of the day. This is a terrible system that turns workers in self-entrepreneurs, where most struggle and a few get a lot of money.

where do you live? The tech workers movement is reaching pretty much everywhere there’s tech production.