nutball

I think the "sabotage" techniques suggested by the author actually benefit companies whose main product is built by intellectual labor. Companies care a great deal about controlling workers: to get them in line, to squeeze labor from them, to weed out motivated folks whose interests don't align with profit, to shut down rabble-rousers, etc. Since the dawn of work, workers have resisted working, and Agile, etc. are just the new strategies management use to control this new group of creative workers.

I wish the author had addressed worker sabotage too. More on that here: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/manual-override/

Yup, open offices primary benefit is surveillance and control. Management is happy to sacrifice individual productivity for more control over workers.

Surveillance is a useful tool for sucking surplus value from our minds. Open offices make ordinary workers (slackers) uncomfortable because of constant surveillance by management, but work isn't about making workers content. Work is about dominating workers so they produce.

An added benefit of the panopticon pen is that it's harder for devs to slack, sabotage, and organize. A watched worker is an easily controlled worker.

Every kid knows that school sucks. A prison for their minds and bodies.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-toward-the...

Social media is work, just like housework is work, and it's about as dull as waged work too. Work is a relationship where some entity extracts surplus value off your unpaid labor.

I like the forced, scrolling text: makes you slow down and pay attention, but also not switch tabs halfway through and get distracted.

Yeah! Math Prof has definitely chosen a side. He obscures that move in a fluff of "politics is complex, decisions are difficult." But politics is everything, and he's engaged in politics knee-deep while pretending not to be. "All I care about is education" calmly states the unwitting Math Prof as education is destroyed to become a hollow commodity for those who can afford it. He's obscuring his politics and hiding that fact that he wants a continuation of the current state of things.

There's a weird fetishism of education. Yeah, optimize yourself for education, remain constantly, obsessively learning so you can become a more valuable commodity. It's that entrepreneurial spirit! The spirit of life itself! (What about playing? Save that for a social media platform that valorizes your free labor.)

Send Jeremy books! http://freejeremy.net/updates/send-jeremy-books/

Yeah, get it! Shoplifting is also worthy challenge, though, that I feel the author underrates. Scams and shoplifting are two ways toward the same goal: exiting the store with goods without paying for them or getting caught. Sticking stuff in your pants or purse is a pretty simple move, sure, but it has its subtleties. And plus there's a bunch of complexities to worry about like security tags, snitching customers, loyal employees, security guards, loss prevention officers, and cameras.

Woah, I followed pretty much the same roadmap as you, except I took the (Python-based) CS600 class at OpenMIT instead of Udacity's CS101. And my year was 2013. I really enjoyed Udacity's CS253 on web development, even if the particular technologies introduced in the course aren't very popular.

Since then, I've been switching gears from Python to JavaScript by learning Node and Angular. I don't view Python as a waste of time, because I think it is a great first language to learn particularly for CS fundamentals. Starting out, I may have been discouraged learning JavaScript as a first language. OOP isn't so straight-forward in JS, and there aren't as many learning resources for algorithms/CS-theory stuff in JS as there are in other languages. Also, learning server-side web development fundamentals with Node.js may have been a struggle, perhaps because there aren't as many resources devoted to beginners and docs as there are with Python/Django. Plus the asynchronous stuff. I'm struggling to learn AngularJS, although it's just straight up difficult I think.

I still need to figure out how to interview well. I have a decent GitHub/portfolio, so I'm generating a good number of interviews despite having 0 professional experience in the field and no CS degree (I have a math degree though). I've had about 20 technical phone screens/interviews not including take-home assignments, and I'm getting better at them. But I'm clearly not there yet, since nobody has offered me a job.

You think thieves stab people? Why would they do that?

Wasn't intending to argue with you, I was just using your comment as a springboard for a comment. I agree with all your points!

I'm not inclined towards a pure conflict against the state without a currently-unfathomable communist process behind the insurrection that topples the state. Look at Egypt: pure conflict that toppled the state, but no great force underlying the conflict to sustain the necessary life outside the state. So you get the Muslim Brotherhood and the military quickly occupying the same state space. I'm interested in conflict, for sure, but only conflict supported by (communist, decentralized, anti-authoritarian, anti-statist) organization capable of sustaining beautiful lives amidst state collapse.

Humans have lived for nearly 200,000 years without states. States, which for their ~10,000 year history have been very ephemeral. Civilization keeps barreling on while states collapse and begin again. The forces that lead to the flux of states like internal power struggles, class conflict, and environmental destruction wouldn't exist in anarchy/communism.

Check out Clastres who argues that pre-civilization human communities had mechanisms to ward off the formation of states.

Systemic violence so drastically outweighs "individual violence" in quantity and affect that there's just no real comparison. Me smacking a dude for talking shit doesn't even come close to the totality of systemic violence: war, poverty, houselessness, rape, abuse, racism, hunger, prison, policing, immigrant concentration camps, border security, alienation, queer bashing, trans murders, environmental catastrophe on a global scale. And that's just the present situation. This violence is felt by individuals very personally, but it is systemic in cause, affect, and result.

The police, media, and state point the finger at a very specific subset of activity and call it violence in order to distract from the overwhelming violence they perpetrate. This is particularly true of those who resist the current state of affairs. Rioters are "violent" because they smash windows. The cops who beat them are merely restoring order. Police are rarely described as "violent" even though they frequently shoot people and control populations with the use of force. Prisoners are the violent ones, not the ones who lock people up in cages. The most oppressed are the violent ones, not those who maintain the system of violence.

To give a little perspective on anarchy and violence:

Anarchism tends to reject moralism. The question isn't whether it's good or bad to kill Frick. It's not about punishing a person for a bad behavior as that sounds awfully like what the state does and it's so-called "Justice." Rather, it's about what force this activity will generate. If a hated figure is assassinated, will this spark revolt? This idea was called "propaganda of the deed" and a similar idea lives on in smashing windows and similar small-scale activities among current North American anarchists: activities that can be picked up by others easily and may spread among the wider population. Other ideas tend to focus on blowing shit up and stuff, like the CCF and FAI. That's cool and all, but I don't think that spectacular acts of violence against the state will do anything to hasten its demise.

Good question. Early anarchists use the words 'freedom' and 'liberty' in a vague manner. This is OK, because anarchy isn't a theory that needs to be based on logical assumptions. It's not a theory at all, but a tendency and a force against the existent. Goldman is using the words in a transcendent fashion, so that when (old) anarchists say 'freedom,' they mean a vague situation beyond the State, unknowable for now- a dream worth fighting for.

Present-day anarchists almost never use the two words in part because of their vagueness and inherent liberalism and in part because of their modern co-optation by neoliberalism and the right. Liberals use the words 'freedom' and 'liberty' to mean the agency of property owners to do what they will with their property and the right to possess things so that others may not use them. It's about markets and money. Freedom of speech, 'having your say,' is important in the marketplace of ideas, where ideas are flattened and life is exorcised.

The anarchist tendency views 'freedom' as the ability to live one's life in a way of their own choosing. It's certainly freedom in the communist sense: the ability to freely access the goods, food, housing, clothes, etc. necessary for life. But anarchy is also freedom from the influences of the State, patriarchy, civilization, white supremacy, all of the great forces which seek to corral us and fuck with our lives and desires.

That U curve makes sense. It aligns with when people usually work.

I'm not sure of an alternative. That needs to be experimental, I think. An analysis of the problem of prisons doesn't require an alternative to be suggested, though. Let me explain.

Prisons are awful places that aren't designed to prevent crime but rather to punish and control. Prisons are awful solutions to solving crime and have been since they became a popular tool of social control in the late 18th century. Before prisons became frequently used, the sovereign would mostly torture and maybe publicly execute criminals. But spectators sometimes would be sickened by this and revolt, freeing the condemned, leading to the questioning of the rule of Law and King. A more efficient solution to problems of social control was invented with the modern prison. Lock people up, and they can't run wild on the street stealing bread and shit.

The US prison system contains 2.3 million people in sick conditions. In the last thirty years, since the economic crisis of the 70's and the decline of welfare services and social democracy, the prison population has exploded with the help of drug laws. This is an apparatus to control the unemployable population so that they aren't running wild on the streets stealing your Macbook.

One alternative idea is restorative justice. Working with the victims and community to understand the root cause of the 'crime' committed and reach a resolution. The offender then is a crucial part of the process. This is similar to what indigenous societies did. This probably wouldn't work in a mass society.

Or get rid of all the prisons. Stop locking people up in cages.

Guy's a far right 'neoreactionary.' Fuck him.