Notes

Sometimes feel powerless from the other side of the world. But solidarity is always needed for those in struggle.

‘On his way to exile, he wrote that he is “very grateful to the solidarity of the people, brothers from Bolivia and the world who reach out with recommendations, suggestions and expressions of recognition that give us encouragement, strength and energy. They moved me to tears. They never abandoned me; I will never abandon them.”’

tribunemag.co.uk/2019/11/bolivias-far-right-coup/

"For we knew only too well:
Even the hatred of squalor
Makes the brow grow stern.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we
Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness
Could not ourselves be kind."

To Posterity, Bertolt Brecht

This article postulates that the solidarity economy is not helpful, because it isn’t revolutionary:

The Real Movement: Against The Solidarity Economy

It was triggered by this article suggesting a change to Marxist theory to incorporate the solidarity economy: regenerationmag.org/marxism-and-the-solidarity-economy/ (only scanned this but seems a bit.. bold. Marx misunderstood his own system, ima fixit)

Smash capitalism or erode it? Not exactly a new point of ideological contention.. interesting though to see solidarity economy explicitly critiqued.

Really interesting article. It reiterates nicely one of the huge possibilities of social media: allowing previously silenced voices to be made public, and surfacing injustices previously hidden. I think it strangely ignores the centralisation of social media though, which essentially means it is mediated again. I think open web technologies can be a counter to that.

theintercept.com/2017/11/25/information-warfare-social-media-book-review-gaza/

Really want to go deep into the political history of the textile industry, any good book recommendations? It’s incredible and horrible lesson from history. Manchester is wrapped up in it.

Like before the industrial revolution, people had spinning wheels and hand looms in their homes. The industrial revolution brought in spinning frames, power looms, centralisation, mass production and a whole shitload of exploitation around the globe to go along with it. Why? Where’s that tendency come from?

So there’s a lot of bad in the ol’ YouTube comments, no doubt, but sometimes you know you stumble across a video where someone has revealed something deeply personal and tender in the comments that the music means to them, and lots of people leave incredibly supportive responses. That’s lovely to see. I feel like you don’t see a lot of genuine warmth on the Internet and it’s nice to know the medium doesn’t strip it out altogether.
I changed my `dotspacemacs-frame-title-format` value to:

“`
dotspacemacs-frame-title-format "%t | %b"
“`

`%t` is projectile-project-name, and `%b` is buffer name. So I will see something like "org | Tasks.org" as the frame title.

The default is `"%I@%S", which is invocation-name@system-name, e.g. emacs@neil-ThinkPad-T450s, which I don’t find that useful.

Reimagination of the party structure through digital platforms. Populism through digitality.

’emerging organisations such as Momentum, the Five Star Movement, Podemos, France Insoumise and many others as “digital parties”, or “platform parties,” […] following the logic of the digital platforms of contemporary capitalism and mimicking operations like Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon.’

— www.plutobooks.com/blog/momentum-labour-online-digital-activism-social-media-party/

Learned a little bit about FPGAs from Alan of myStorm today. I’m a long way from clocking it all, but I think a couple of concepts sunk in… I’d like to know more about chip design and hardware, the fundamentals.

The BlackIce Mx looks super fun, an open hardware FPGA dev board. Someone was demoing the NES chips built on one, and Alan showed me an implementation of RISC-V. mystorm.uk/mystorm-opensource-fpga-hardware-blackice-mxusing-blackedge/

When you look at the resources required to do quantum research, or even just fabricate silicon chips for that matter, I think that along with small tech, appropriate tech, etc, there’s a need to think about guerrilla technology. The creative use of small technology to counter the misuse of more ‘advanced’ technology by those with access to orders of magnitude more resources. Ways of tackling the asymmetry. Better understanding of the terrain. Small units of organisation with mobility.
I don’t have a great grasp of what’s going on with quantum computing, but I saw a talk today about how it is advancing apace. IBM now at 53 qubits.

Given the stated potential of quantum computers, it seems worrying that they will be the playthings of wealthy states and corporations. Barclays recently used it for some financial application for example. The liberatory potential could be vast, but will it be used for those ends? Don’t want to be a crank, but I’m not feeling particularly hopeful…