Federated communities that make decisions on consensus, with the fundamental rule that “those affected get to decide”.

There’s a lot more to it and there’s a lot to unpack in just the above paragraph, but if the only alternative you can imagine is a global military dictatorship then it’s hard to know where to even start explaining it to be quite honest.

With your username I’m not surprised you’re in cybersecurity lol.

And I never said all managers are bastards. I said that they act that way as a group.

Ultimately the incentive structure reinforces PMC workers who toe the company line. It could never be any other way in a capitalist framework. Yes, it’s possible for knowledge workers to operate outside capitalist organisations, but they are going to have a harder time with less money. The bulk of the work will always be done where the money is. You see this very clearly in FOSS circles - the work involves people who are either too tired from their 9 to 5 to put a lot of effort in, they’re the sort of person who can’t work in a capitalist org, or they’re paid by a capitalist org which will have certain demands on their work. The result is that FOSS tends to be rough around the edges which inherently reinforces the belief that only top-down capitalist structures can make polished software.

You’ll find knowledge workers in general are going to be hard to unionise. They are better compensated and privileged so they have more to lose, and they have to adopt the ideology of their bosses to some extent in order to reproduce it in their work. We’ve seen union action with actors and writers for a long time, and it seems to be bleeding over from them into the videogame space. I hope it will keep spilling over into other technical spaces, but I don’t think we can rely on that happening to fundamentally change the character of that class.

I thought I’d have to explain this part - the technical knowledge workers are also managerial, but in a more indirect way.

All three of the professions you listed make decisions about the function of the systems that workers use every day. They are responsible for taking the policy decisions that are made to serve the owning class, and giving those policies shape.

They literally design our environment, and as the Well There’s Your Problem podcast points out, engineering and other technical decisions are political. The preferences of the bosses are built into them.

I guess this is pretty unpopular though. I guess there are a lot of knowledge workers on this platform and they don’t like being compared to cops.

Caffene.

Sure, they are technically part of the working class, but they’re similar to cops. Cops aren’t the owning class, they take down a salary, but they’re also class traitors.

The middle class - aka professional managerial class - as a group fulfill a similar role of keeping the rest of the working class in line in exchange for certain privileges. They just use paychecks and memorandums rather than guns and laws.

Also like cops, they provide an ideological shield for capitalists. Cops are overtly the “thin blue line” between “order and chaos”. The middle class are a shield for aspirations. People are encouraged to identify as middle class so they think they have something to lose if they were to upset the status quo.

So it makes sense to identify this group, but too often it’s as a shield. Like the implication in this article that a housing crisis for the middle class is a huge problem, but who cares about the housing precarity that’s existed in the working class since its inception? Well one reason it would be a big problem for the ruling class is that they would lose their buffer. If it’s just lords and serfs and a sharp distinction between them, then overturning the whole thing is a lot easier to contemplate.

Sounds like the work of saboteurs.

If you’re using a personal api from google, is that a way that google can track you? Part of using a VPN, noscript and adblock for me is to prevent that kind of tracking.

Fellow vpn user here, it’s been really bad lately. I’m definitely installing this.

Thanks, I don’t think it’s worded quite right though, because “in exchange for” implies the vote itself does something. The reality is that people are convinced to give away their power because they believe in the piece of paper.

The oiece of paper itself is almost worthless.

I only say that because I’m sure someone will want to split hairs over it.

People are indoctrinated to believe that because votes are involved the process is somehow magically subject to meaningful reform and input from the masses.

A process where people were meaningfully enfranchised wouldn’t need to rely on something so abstract as votes. Voting is a process by which people are convinced to trade in their actual power in exchange for a piece of paper.

No, don’t just tell me the harm you reckon is happening, demonstrate it.

You want to claim some harm is happening, then show your working.

I’ve given some pretty compelling evidence that public support for these activists is extremely high, and in response you have… some flatulence.

Here, I’ll respond in the way you did:

But it is moving the needle, it totally is!

See? I can say things too.

Even a single nullification is incredibly rare, but it’s happening enough that the government is making efforts to stamp out discussion of jury nullification.

We all know what the Streisand Effect is, so the logical result here is that more and more people will hear about the practice, more people will do it, and the public and those in power will get the message - you can’t weaponise the legal system against us anymore.

It might even get to the point that they’re afraid to prosecute because they don’t want more nullifications to happen.

Then what? What do the people in power do when they discover that they can no do that? They start to be afraid of what else people might nullify. What about actual violent actions, would people get a free pass then? How willing would they be to throw the cops against people when those people are starting to wake up to the fact that we outnumber them, and we don’t have to convict people if we don’t want to?

When they’re afraid of that, you might start to see action. Or you might see more violent repression, at which point who knows what the next step will be, but it’s better than sitting around waiting for committees to decide that action must be taken which will then be ignored by those in power.

And we get ignorant people and despots because people in power use propaganda to miseducate the public, not because art galleries close.

Is there any data in here to suggest what the actual effect is on level of support, rather than people self-reporting their change in level of support?

Because here’s one reading of the data, which I think is entirely reasonable:

1. The people who report “no effect” on their support, which at 40% is the largest single group, already support efforts to address climate change, and this makes no difference to them.

2. The people who report a decrease, great or otherwise, of their support, are just conservatives who know that the talking point is “this action decreases support” and so they’re answering in a way that supports that narrative. In reality, these people were already opposed to any meaningful action in the first place, and this didn’t change their actual level of support.

Without further analysis, this survey doesn’t say much. Even the questions dishonestly imply that actual damage is being done to art, when that generally isn’t the case.

Again, that survey comes up against a tide of jury nullifications, which would indicate a very strong material support for these activists and the cause they represent. The courts are trying to penalise people for mentioning climate change in their defense, which has got to blow back in their faces eventually. In fact these court cases may be an important part of swinging public sentiment against the government and towards radical action to change things.

Unless you can demonstrate an actual harm that these people are doing to the cause, I am going to give them my support for doing SOMETHING. If it moves the needle a millionth of a percent in the right direction, tear down all the art galleries. We only have one planet.

Many of these cases have had jury nullification, which means a jury of twelve people who have been vetted to remove bias, all unanimously agreed to say “fuck you” to the legal system rather than lock up JSO activists.

That tells me that there is considerable public support for them, whatever you say to the contrary.

How the fuck did you read that as anything but a joke? Like seriously, how? What did you think I was saying with that comment?

EDIT: And just to be clear, I am an anarchist and I think it’s absurd that any state has the hubris to tell anyone that they’re not allowed to die. FOH.

I’m gonna go ahead and feel threatened.

There is no ethical suicide under capitalism.

It’s a little jarring in a world of deep-fried memes.

No worries, Know Your Meme is still fairly reliable.