I’m talking about a private individual invading the physical and digital spaces of public institutions with the president providing political cover and stopping other parts of the state to intervene. That’s a self-coup. Nothing like that happened in Italy and so far the government is operating within legality.

anywhere outside Milan you won’t be able to rely on English for anything. Bureaucracy and services are going to be a nightmare without conversational Italian.

No self-coup happened yet, most constitutional freedoms are still respected, there are no political extra-judicial arrests (or at least not that many). Except for some repression of communitarian spaces and public protests, it is not sensibly different from any center/center-right neoliberal government.

It’s obviously an open topic of debate in philosophy, but genes have agency for some definition of agency.

In a cybernetic sense, they have agency in the sense that the information within them transforms the world way more than the world affects their information. They are more players than chessboard.

For people like Dennet, which I’m not necessarily a fan of, you can think of agency (and therefore freedom) as the ability of any unit of matter to prevent its dissolution in the face of threats. Life can be framed as a strategy of DNA to reproduce itself in the face of entropy. That is agency.

While genetic agency is often appropriated by reactionary politics, it’s a quite established scientific perspective.

ITT: very little pseudoscience. It’s pseudoscience only when you try to pass something non-scientific as science (understood in the modernist sense). There are plenty of systems of knowledge that are outside of science and don’t really care about passing as science when making statements about the world: metaphysics, theology, cybernetics, open systems theory, and so forth. Those are not pseudosciences.

Science cannot even prove itself as a method. Science is just spicy epistemology.

Memetics is not really pseudoscience. It was science, there there were compelling evidence and arguemtns that ideas have no agency on their own, contrary to genes, and the whole field died for good.

but then it’s a social force, and social force can be turned into a physical force. I would say any cybernetician would agree with this. Social signals are part of the same system of physical signals. Then we can argue cybernetics is not science but rather its own paradigm, but that’s a different conversation.

co-operatives are started by worker’s initiative. It’s not something that comes to save you. If there’s no co-op in your area, start learning what you need to start one, govern one, and how to find co-op funding.

It depends on where you live and what you’re looking for in life.

The people who wrote that page are mostly from the organization discussed in the article. Struggling doesn’t mean they never achieved anything. Also maybe go beyond the title.

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.

you answered to the wrong person.

In fact I was talking about “foot worshipping” and not foot fetish in general, which are arguably very different dynamics.

Every kink is a kink because the object of the kink holds some specific value or logic within the social context that is then relived or subverted within the kinky dynamic. If foot worshipping wasn’t, historically and symbolically, an act of submission in society, it wouldn’t be a kink at all.

It’s just to understand if you do politics or you just talk about politics.

Criticizing without strategic and contextual awareness of what you’re criticizing should stop being normalized. If you just have opinions on stuff instead of building or participating into organizations, I know for sure I can disregard your words.

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

How are you contributing to that?

I think it’s time for you to be introduced to the concept of “cognitive work”. We have been doing that for a few thousand years now.