The Assumed Role of Literature in Revolution

The act of reading and writing, as with many actions one can take, is a form of resistance, an active political tool of reassessment. What you read, choose to profess and would deem worth “your time” all influence many parts of you - from how you engage people to what time you end up going to sleep. It’s not necessarily trapped to a particular genre, we see effectively bored white men rehash their opinions of hegemonic violence in their many collections of patriot fiction or third-person accounting of events of foreign invasions described as “righteous war”. We have activists retelling their times of imprisonment for demanding less than the bare minimum from an establishment dedicating to making life a reminder of the violence that’s been become "normal" to lands for hundreds of years. And on the same hand, some of the most infamous names in history hadn’t the ability to do either - they communicated clearly and had trusted folks that did the writing and reading they needed as they focused on their own works. In reading works from people of many backgrounds and walks of life, one can be reminded of their placement among them, as nothing happens in a vacuum; despite what media and plutocratic society tells us via their paid spokespeople and eager parrots.

I am afraid. I do not believe that the idea of this violence is made clear, nor is it of immediate concern, even to some of those holding strong sentiments for community well-being and development. Even the case of book banning within the United States, a now-trivialized situation by mainstream media of authors having their visibility in their intended place of reading, does not focus enough on how this is an extension of the general nature of the United States’ need to maintain a state of both disillusion and lack of self-guided intellect. Additionally, according to mainstream media, there’s no clear interest in longer and more insightful discussions between representatives, not even on a hyper-local level, when news stations were once more willing to report on these things - in part of commercial social networking’s ability to create spaces of aggressive thought collapse. Tying that with the nature of language as a tool of both oppression and maintenance, there’s little reason to expect people to stumble upon concepts that lead them to truth, there isn’t enough capital that can be made from that (whereas masculinity and its tendrils intertwined with capitalism tend to be, by design and shaping by the market’s directors). These things, the inability to acknowledge the role of book banning in maintaining a populace of disillusioned and disinterested people, the lack of open debate and discussion free of the corporate and professional class of “political commentators” (a substitute for the direct voice and direct words of the people) and now the inability for people to directly understand and parse what impact local laws that are both illegible to the public like Florida State Bill 256 in 2023 or more encompassing and equally illegible like Presidential Policy Directive 20 are tools of weapons against the people who reside within the United States. Despite what the media industry has repeated on behalf of the government, national security does not mean the security of life and stability for those outside of the realm of the political industry, but more on the ability of a nation to maintain its ability to continue its behavior with no restraint.

What does one do to combat this (can we truly)? The most immediate answer under capitalistic society is to produce even more material - but this is shortsighted as the material has to be engaged with, discussed and provide actionable output lest it becomes what James Baldwin had described (in references to books) as a meal for “the affluent populations". These people (which is us), "which should have been their [poor working class people] help, didn’t, as far as could be discovered, read, either - they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes”. We are crafting new ways to cope with the new middle class's uncomfortable place in society, providing these people with new language to further entrench themselves as the “new” lords and aristocrats. Obtaining awards to address but never directly challenge, to critique but never truly attack, from the same institutions of violence does nothing but provide a yet another opinion into the void of toothless insurgent actions. These eagerness to run to these behaviors are as strong as the notion that voting makes a difference in a country where the people, places and roles that need elections are inaccessible, invisible and non-controllable by the American public. We have to push harder than dancing around topics and return to rooting ourselves in what “action” means. Wikipedia defines action from the lens of philosophy as “an event that an agent performs for a purpose, that is, guided by the person’s intention”. We work within a world of many performers whose intentions tend to centralize around extraction, coercion and demolition of the meanings of humanity. We collectively accept the concept of inaction, the opposite of what Max Weber would define of social action to be “the subjective meaning [of action] tak[ing into] account the behavior of others”. Inaction can be seen as a choice of indifference, especially when it comes from those who have the most freedoms to engage in such behavior. By choosing not to engage people who’ve spent time doing the work to interrogate, demand and produce action, one can slide into silent and passive acceptance of the hegemonic violence that we currently see rampaging Syria and the south side of Chicago, under the rule of Modhi and Macon, the intertwining nature of violence of Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden as agents of the spectacle and its child, terrorism. We won’t see it as any more than an “issue in a foreign land”, something to comment about on our neocolonialist devices of communication from our places of comfort within the belly of the beast. If we choose to do anything, the very least we should do is choose to listen to the people who our leaders are willing to print money to kill. Read and understand what they're saying and do everything you can to prevent their actions from being in vain.

“For if they find their state intolerable, but are too heavily oppressed to change it, they are simply pawns in the hands of larger powers, which, in such a context, are always unscrupulous, and when, eventually, they do change their situation [sic], we are menaced more than ever, by the vacuum that succeeds all violent upheavals,” by James Baldwin from The Fire Next Time.

CEOs really make me laugh.

I really enjoyed reading Elizabeth Anderson’s book, “Private Government”. It’s a lecture she’s given with responses from other people, a philosopher, economist and historians. Having these sorts of people of different analytical lens wasn’t something I fully appreciated until she made her closing arguments. If almost by design, some of my notes that I made as I read rung loudly in this final chapter. She refrains from giving a concrete guide on what to do about the dilemma she’s addressing, the concept of the overreaching and arbitrary rule of governance that employers are capable of deploying in workplaces. This I appreciate because it returns the agency to the same people she's discussing are impacted heavily by private government: workers. When I was employed at Code for America, I cited this book in conversational spaces over Slack, solely in water-cooler rooms. There was a clear difference in how the two branches of private government, in this case, the conventional workers and that of the managerial realm, in how they responded to this. I’m almost certain that as part of my separation agreement and my severance agreement, that I can’t speak verbatim on what exactly was said. I can mention what, while finishing this book, reminded me of those times at work there and my time at Glitch.

“We live in a society.”

I remember having a lunch conversation during  my first week at Glitch. I have to admit, that week was a blur. So it’s significant that I remember a few of us at a table bench talking about (handwaves) the world. I remember a mention of mangoes and where the best ones are. Then some time later, Anil Dash and I were talking about something dealing with society, our work and culture (I think). He expressed his understanding of the dilemma of the industry and in the same breath mentioned that it’s the society we live under - it being capitalism. I remember coming to sharpness in attention around here because it wasn’t something I was expecting him to mention. We were wrestling lightly with this but I remember not saying more - not like things were afoot or anything.

Shout out to the workers of Glitch, past and present, by the way. Y’all are amazing - love running into y’all. I also learned a lot about software development and management at my (short) time - shit happens, though, because neoliberalistic capitalism.

I didn’t fully understand why that exchange lingered so much in my mind - not until I got to Code for America.

"My family came from a union.”

I haven’t had any one-on-one interactions with Amanda Renteria. In fact, I think the most personal interaction I’ve had was the signature in my offer letter.  That said,  some stuff happened after I signed that and that eventually led to more spaces in which I did interact with her. During one of the many sessions of bargaining for the first union contract at Code for America, she made it known - and I think this was something that’s been repeated a few times - that she came from a union family. I routinely had moments during these sessions where I couldn’t tell if some of the comments were meant to be a way to reset the already tense nature of these sessions. Prime meme placement here.

Let me set this scene up a bit more. By now, I’m at the nine-year mark of my time working in the software industry - two years after Glitch. Despite having worked on large-scale systems and rapid consulting projects for viral startups, I still sweat when I’m in these spaces because my capability means nothing when it comes to challenging a power dynamic that I began to understand as similar as the one I saw when I left work (or closed my laptop) and reengaged with society. Skill means nothing when you begin to push on the very thin barrier of the hierarchy at work. This barrier gets more pressure on when workers begin having conversations about how work is done and who benefits from said work. This gets more complex in non-profits since, despite the company lawyer's mention of "users", the American public weren't paying us - donors were. The pressure I felt each time having to make the case with the work that dozens of workers had spent hours researching, drafting and analyzing how and what changes could be made to help meet management at the table wasn’t small: it felt like being brought back to the interview process and being asked “what will you defend most: the health of the company or your individual well-being?”, constantly repeating “I want collective health and organizational strength” and then being immediately rejected for the role for not being a "culture fit".

Safe to say that workers got what they fought for: a contract that enshrines the values that they work day-in and day-out to bring to people who need aid. A mantra now burned into my mind by one of the organizing, then bargaining then severance committee members was one that was short and to the point: Workers deserve more.

Y’all (CEOs) must live different.

This returns me to the opening point and indirectly to the title of this post. Anderson makes the astute point that, despite being able to do ice breakers with these people, we are not alike. She states (emphasis mine):

Private government at work embeds inequalities in authority, standing and esteem in the organizations upon which people depend for their livelihood. Those cosigned to the status of wage worker for life have no real way out: while they can quit any given employer, often at great cost and risk, they cannot opt out of the wage labor system that structurally degrades and demeans them.

This paragraph reminded me a lot of this discontent I felt and justified the reactions to our messaging to management. There’s been actions where I was extremely shocked at how our leadership chose to respond. I had to clock that it’s not me that’s provoking this response - it’s the challenge to their unchecked authority that’s invoking this. Anderson’s book aims to introduce a space in where one could have a legitimate conversation about the nature of work, specifically the governance of work - all of which in the conventional corporate fashion is inherently private - even 501(c)3 non-profit non-governmental organizations - and how this impacts us on a daily basis.

The interactions I’ve had with these two leading executives branched from the same tree: that because of the world we live in, we must accept it and play by its rules as much as possible because anything else doesn’t work. It’s an extremely narrow view and it’s what helps entrench the inequalities at work that the liberal rise of DEI was alleging to help resolve. I highlight that especially because despite the efforts of it, we still have cases where companies are comfortable with underpaying employees (even keeping wages stagnant in relation to inflation but rising theirs) and instead of rectifying that, we get the same behavior that’s happened since the introduction of identity politics: the coopting of DEI for the purpose of union busting and the reducing the ability of workers to critique or hold leadership accountable for failing to maintain DEI objectives. It’s frustrating because I wanted these people to be the kind of folks who could put power to use and make change not just for their reputation organization, but for fellow organizations and giving precedent to change in how we can work (and beyond).

Frankly, I’d propose both of these folks to take a pay reduction to match the average salary of all non-managerial staff for the average tenure of said staff to understand both how short the culture of a side of the organization that they don’t have to interface with often with manages to get by before coming back to any conversations about equity or inclusion. Of course, there’s things in life that could cause higher needs of cash on hand - like better healthcare, extended family care and support, exploring things like a more flexible work-week to allow better work-life balance, especially in [a now unrecognized pandemic. or having funds for familial or self-development on hand. Even allowing for better systems of delegation such that work consolidation (with equivalent compensation) into one person can reduce bus factors and effectively give people more true equity in the work they contribute. I remember a moment during the unit clarification hearing where childcare was needed and thinking this!

But then you’d be describing a worker-owned cooperative. Since these executives are beholden to their own private governments (the Board that never has to join those all-hands but controls what the people who control your paycheck), it’d be easier to imagine them adjusting this pay readjustment as a pilot or a show of good will to workers to encourage them to not invoke their rights in the workplace (which isn’t too hard). Consider it a remix on the holiday bonus!

At the end of the day, I remain firm in my stance that a workplace that doesn’t provide workers a actionable voice into how their labor contributes to the well-being of the organization and its assets as a whole needs a union. Especially tech companies, with our short tenures, pay gaps even at the highest-funded organizations, still-rampant discrimination and more regressive policies in labor management.

That’s why CEOs make me laugh. The disconnection from reality that can come even from a considerable pay raise, elevated status and control and the ease of dismissal of the needs of the workers who transfer their labor into their direct deposit of $29,105.17 per month (which, before taxes, is about 3/4 of a US presidential salary as of 2001) is something I’ll never be able to relate to, a side effect of how capitalism has split the wealth capture between millennials and Gen X. This is the kind of correlation that Anderson makes as she speaks about the economist who tries their best to minimize a whole swath of workers, the lives they live under capitalism and how companies take advantage of that - for profit or reputation. I was just hoping for a bit more behind the words from these people, but I'm understanding now that this is the taint you take with that job so it's not even personal.

Sadly, because of how this country works, I have to end this by disclosing that my inclusion of the people mentioned does not consititute an attack or defamational message about them, the organizations or affliated parties, and should not be construted as the such. This exists as an opinion blog post, nothing more. Depending on how one parses it will be told by time.

it's interesting to think of computer programs as very long mathematical operations because you'd think that'd imply that we could make them infallible (or at least easy to cover from a point of failure) but we rarely see that surfaced outside the context of like DX (IMHO - I'd love to read about cases where that isn't the case). I can think of a case where some long polling operation can be popped in and out of (like if you're contacting 30 services in serial fashion but want the user to see feedback as you go along but we kind of ignore how long it takes things to complete away and hide this behind a "loader").

One thing that I wrangle with (but the IndieWeb does permit) is the idea that a domain is an identity. Yes, domains are “cheap” now. I can also throw $5—$7 on lunch every day. That might not seem like a luxury outside our bubble, but things like that can be expensive. So the idea of being able to “share” a domain (either via a subdomain or a URL, like colleges give out “hosting”) is interesting to me. But I'd want to hear from the people who have this problem, versus attempting to propose something prescriptively.

Working on DayJob code, I noticed how one file is like nearly 3,000 lines. Now for my own projects, I have this "thing" where I'm reaching nearly a thousand lines of code (including comments) that I feel compelled to move it into another file. That's if I notice it. I barely do nowadays but when I do, I'm always a bit shocked—for no particular reason outside “wow, that's a lot of lines”.

I do think hosted databases are going to die out over the next 5 – 7 years for B2C applications and move to allow people to store data on their devices and just collect metrics. It's cheaper for companies. Biggest issue would be handling “migrations” but eh.

I'm combing down the list of open issues on the Microsub tracker, and I was thinking again about how I'd want to “simplify” the experience of people following one another. I thought of this mainly for my implementation of Microsub, but I think that having the ability to preview who to add and being able to make a 'meta-subscription' can help. This would do the work of discovering the feeds at a URL, subscribing to all of them but showing them as multiple ones in a reader. The reader would need to know the original feed to recommend its whole removal, which is something that's tricky.

Something I think that's slightly forgotten about DNS is that yes, we have a centralized form of it that we use every day. We can also encourage decentralized forms of it (without web3, dear God) in conjunction to the federated ones we use every day. Granted, companies tend to use this for internal development environments and I use nss to give my local Docker containers resolvable host names. If we had a way to specify what resolvers for DNS we could use in a computer as simply as we can set up WiFi, we could see a way for people to encourage “private” DNS with a one-click setup. Obviously, a good desktop environment would allow for an option to 'reset' this in the event the upstream resolver fails.

Made excellent progress on this. I'm becoming more aware of the need to have JF2 support to support other places that things can be piped from. It'll also become more required as I begin working on the Microsub facets of Lighthouse. I've managed to not focus on it, just it. I can also see it simplifying the logic for my templates on my site if I use that, but I'll have to see.

• posted archived copycurrent

I do think that I might entertain the idea of using @context in my MF2+JSON when rendering my feeds. It's a small change that promotes MF2 in the JSON form and it makes it discoverable when attempting to parse (outside of content type hints).

How many of you all be using Twitter Blue? Seeing Facebook's Instagram attempt to launch paid subscriptions makes me wonder how viable those things are (and if people are seeing actual numbers)?

byhttps://jacky.wtf • posted archived copycurrent

I ask because after seeing https://twitter.com/Gynesys/status/1506250846404857857, that sort-of completes the trifecta of the big social media platforms integrating paid subscriptions (versus free ones). Things like KoFi, Liberapay et al work just as well but require people to have alternative accounts.

This is something one probably learns in OS fundamentals, but there's like only three file operations that exist: reading, writing and deleting. Everything else is like a combination of these.

I mean, even deletion could be a special form of writing, but I don't know what that'd look like.

Was thinking about how to fetch Webmentions and I think that this approach is not only fantastic (obviously biased, lol) but now once more implementations pick this up, static sites can provide a feed of their Webmentions with one line! That's truly my hope—to be able to query Webmentions (and subscribe to them) so people can see reactions to things in their social reader. An intelligent reader could filter out some of those replies (from undesired sources) and still give a relatively healthy experience.

You know, I understand why we use UIDs for foreign key identifiers. I understand if you got like a billion rows or if you never actually delete anything. But like if you know it's small, don't bother.

I'm glad that SQLite nudges away from concrete types and uses storage types. Because the need to test values is pushed up into the application layer, and I don't think I like doing a lot of strict typing in the database (though I've been bitten with and without it)

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This is something I need to come back to during lunch today. https://pudding.cool/2022/02/plain/

by someone • archived copycurrent

Okay, checking this out now. Overall, this is a superb piece about language. I'm still reading Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch and this reminds me a lot of her work.

Some things I wish it highlighted:

  • The use of language to hide access from those who don't grok things when it comes to the Web (or just media—like there's a difference between manslaughter and murder and I only found out a few days ago)!
  • I love this bit — “There is so much implied in how we write, and plain language should aim to make the implicit more explicit.” This is something I need to work on myself, and I wonder if it's an attribute at being good at either communicating or writing.
  • Black-box solutions meant to work for the masses can't do their job. The masses need the ability to review, adapt and configure said solutions. Things like that is why the Lexile Framework for Reading is trash from that short demo.

The Pudding is also a very interesting site! Definitely subscribing to see more from them.

“Onboarding” is one of those things that I wonder is a collective psychosis that we've put on people to think there's a “right” way to do something. Like sure, there's very wrong ways, but how can something so specific be generalized so much? I'd love to learn more.

The appeal of communally owned (be it civic or otherwise) network services keep coming back to me. Especially now as I'm reading about being a civic technologist and understanding how Big Tech can take tax dollars to run services, that money would be better spent in locally trained groups and resources. There's more of an investment in having quality services if you also HAVE to use it (and need it to get by). That seems to immediately fade with conglomerates like Microsoft and Amazon.