A Symbol for Tech Workers
write.as
write.as
A little optional background story: the moment I saw a Mac performa turn on at a friends house, my first encounter with a GUI, it was an instant Eureka click moment for me: "this screen could show anything". I was a little kid and figuring out ways to buy more Legos drove a decent part of my motivational loop. Computers immediately appealed to me as something I could work on forever, as a kit of infinite legos. The whispers of "this screen could show anything" became "i could make this screen show anything, do anything". Computers represented a post-physical creation, something unlike physical matter: reprogrammable, malleable, flexible, infinitely recombineable.
Tech Work is something I do. It's probably good for tech workers to have some better solidarity, to try to advance their lot. But setting out sights so low feels like a waste. Singing songs of computing to be, of ever better bicycles for the mind, of systems that augment us better, where we co-develop ever richening agency & ever better perches into the information-architectures we travel across... that is more akin to the core spirit of tech to me, that is where I want solidary, and symbols. A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace[1] for all it's vision & grandiosity talks mostly about the freedom-froms, about how this realm is not dogged by conventional powers, is a place that can always be settings itself free, be ever emerging, but it's still in many ways as reactionary & old-reality-focused as this idea of Tech Workers Union.
So, I say, let there also be a Tech Dreamers Union too. Let those who wish to better explore & settle the frontier have their symbols of hope & progress too.