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Comment by jumpman500 | Hacker News Reader

It's time to unionize. The top is out of touch and the valuations of these tech titans aren’t just staggering; they’re symptomatic of a system that values profit over people. These tycoons at the helm are not just steering companies—they’re puppeteering democracy, pushing political agendas that many of us find abhorrent and irrelevant to our lives. Unionization isn’t merely about better pay or working conditions; it’s about reclaiming power from this oligarchy that’s grown too powerful, too influential. The tech community needs to wake up and get these clowns in line, we could shut these companies down if we organize.

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Former big tech worker here, I'd support unionization wholeheartedly, but it's also worth advocating for cessation of all Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, etc products and software. Build software for linux only, explicitly choose to not support Windows, Mac OS, iOS, or Android. Support and test on Gecko-based browsers, reject Webkit-based and Blink-based browsers. Act like people are making you uncomfortable whenever they offer statements, comments, or questions that normalize gmail, facebook, iphones, or outlook. Become a FLOSS evangelist. Help your non-technical friends install a browser that supports manifest v2 and full-fat ad blocking. Help people set up adguard or pihole. Make it sound cool, easy, and seductive. Disrespect the ruling elite / "eat the rich!" vibes. Normalize anti-surveillance. Normalize full-face masks and juggalo paint and avante garde clothing that disrupts facial recognition algorithms. Build on a VPS, build on a dedicated server, build on clouds that aren't owned and operated by multitrillion dollar conglomerate monstrosities. Make AWS, Azure, and GCP as socially unacceptable as racism, sexism, and transphobia.

This isn't a call to arms for luddites, this is a call to kill the trillion dollar companies with grassroots direct action that is intentionally and purposefully organized to decrease the revenue and social acceptance of these organizations. This is a pro-tech movement, it's just pro-tech that respects your freedom, your privacy, your rights to decide what your hardware and software are / are not doing. We will not be the feudal subjects of these tyrants.

We must be the revolutionary change we want to see by lunging straight for the hearts of these evil empires. Grassroots direct action, spread the word.

Practically all software that matters is already Linux only. That happened 15-20 years ago as a combination of “cloud” and “SaaS”.

Android and iOS apps, with the exception of games, are usually just thin presentation layers around cloud apps. Hint: if you have to log in, the real app a cloud app running on a Linux server.

But I don’t see what that has to do with executive compensation.

Exorbitant executive compensation coming from the same companies that are aggressively infringing upon the rights of their end users are two expressions of the same tyrannical desires of these big tech companies. They're trying to bring about neofeudalism where we're all peasants serving our big tech lords.

Also, it's not about supporting Linux, it's about not supporting tyrants (Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, et. al.). Whenever you offer compatibility for Windows, Mac OS, iOS, or Android, you are excusing, encouraging, and supporting tyranny and neofeudalism.

> Android and iOS apps, with the exception of games, are usually just thin presentation layers around cloud apps.

Consider using and supporting GNU/Linux phones. Sent from my Librem 5.

Upvoted from my PinePhone Pro :)

Thanks for your support. However, your upvote didn't register (I still have 1 point on the comment). I noticed this sometimes happening with me recently, too. You can verify this by unvoting and looking at my karma in the profile not changing.

I think an equal number of upvotes and a downvotes/flags does this, too.

The test I suggested would reveal that, too.

Oooh, just tried upvoting this one and it looks like your karma stayed constant at 8301. Strange. I wonder if there's a limit to how much karma one account can give another through upvotes within a certain time period.

Tech and Software adjacent professions have to be ones that are least likely to unionize.

There was an internal survey (unofficial) at my workplace right after a mass layoff 2 years back about how many were interested in forming a union. There were 3 options - Interested, Not Sure and Against. The option with most votes was "Against".

I could go into the reasons which were submitted in survey but in short most were related to hyper individualism that is so pervasive.

Admitting in a survey that you're pro-union might be (rightly) perceived as high-risk, no reward.

Yes, but the hyper-individualism is very familiar. I wonder if the balance has changed since the 2022 wake-up call.

Wow that really sounds like a captor killing a few captives and then asking the rest of the “ok, so who else wants to try to work together to escape?”

One would get far better responses if you just used the word "professional association" instead of "union".

The right time would have been when the going was good some years back. Tech workers could have put together an unparalleled strike fund and commanded unprecedented political power. We could have truly changed the world.

But, as already mentioned, if you think sentiment is unfriendly to unions now, it's nothing compared to how it was back then. The typical tech worker somehow thought they were already changing the world, doing some VC's bidding for nickels on the dollar, adding sparkly features to another B2B SaaS product...

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