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Comment by cs137 | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like a good thing, but I'm not sure it is.

Capital wins under the current system because the bad guys control your reputation and career, but capital will win under a pseudonymous work system too because careers will cease to exist (or, in any case, will be difficult to assemble) and the commoditization of labor will be complete.

I'm a very "out" antifascist, and I've lost jobs due to my public not-liking-fascists, so I'm sympathetic to people who'd benefit from pseudonymous work, but fiverrization is not the way forward.

The solution is to have aggressive right-to-forget, anti-blacklisting, and anti-discrimination laws, and not only to enforce them vigorously but to go forward on the presumption of employee innocence (that is, innocent until proven guilty).

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> I'm a very "out" antifascist, and I've lost jobs due to my public not-liking-fascists

That kind of statement makes me curious. What kind of behavior do you exhibit that has cost you jobs?

I'm also interested.

If I'm running a company that has to do business with ordinary people, I want to avoid hiring someone who vocally and publicly espouses radical political views that many people would react to negatively. Even if they are "pseudonymous", since it could still become known later on that they are associated with the company.

Different people define "fascism" so differently that being "antifascist" could mean anything from protesting against the KKK, to actively working to bring down the capitalist world order (which happens to be the framework in which most companies have to operate.)

If I have radical political views, that's the part of my life that I'm keeping pseudonymous.

> being "antifascist" could mean anything from protesting against the KKK, to actively working to bring down the capitalist world order (which happens to be the framework in which most companies have to operate.)

I'd say I'm between the two.

I'm a radical by US false-consciousness standards, but a moderate by sane-people standards. I do want to bring down the capitalist world order, but I'm not going to behave unethically, break laws blithely, or fuck over an employer who treats me well in service to that goal.

In general, I'm against violence unless absolutely nothing else will work (and I don't think we're at that point yet, although we may get there). Violent revolutions tend to see a transfer of control from the originial vanguard (who were willing to use violence to achieve a goal, but who didn't seek out the opportunity to use it) to mindless thugs who just want to be paid to hurt people.

To start, I've written about what would happen in event of a violent revolution in the US. Mind you, I'm not advocating for it--completely the opposite, because the answer is: it would be fucking terrible and there's a very high chance of the bad guys (fascist "populists") taking it over, even if it started on the left (which is itself improbable, because almost all the violent assholes are right-wing racists). One company, which did about 20% clearance-required work, rescinded an offer at 7:57 on the fucking morning I was about to start because "we don't see you getting a security clearance", even though I had a crack clearance attorney review my case and say that I was clearable.

I also exposed some illegal/unethical hiring and fundraising practices, and made enemies of some high-profile VCs. I don't talk to the press these days (don't trust 'em) but my reputation in the startup world is ruined. I'm enough of a whistleblower that my name will have negative value in Silicon Valley for the rest of my life (which is fine, because fuck Silicon Valley).

It probably doesn't hurt at this point, but certainly doesn't help, that I have PTSD and, in the past--say, 10 years ago--I was not as good at controlling it, recognizing when I was sufficiently impaired to need to pull back from the internet, and doing so.

Ignoring the political aspect, as you're clearly biased: companies will see "whistleblowing" as a bad regardless of whether you exposed something worthy of being exposed. Even if those other companies have nothing to hide. Nobody wants their employees digging around in a hostile manner. They want loyalty, not spies.

You're not wrong. Ultimately, companies are run by bosses optimizing for their personal utility functions, which put them on the strategy of remaining bosses. They want reliable mediocrity, not risky excellence. Variance minimization, not expectancy. The only part of it that's objectively criminal is the false advertising: companies promise meritiocracy and just expect you to have the social skills to realize they don't mean it.

Another solution is UBI.

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