Kind: Notes

Lovely

"If capitalism is a disease, then it’s one that eats your flesh – and then profits from selling your bones for fertilizer, and then invests that profit to reap the cane harvest, and then sells that harvest to tourists who pay to visit your headstone."

— [[A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things]]

Genuine question: can anyone point me to a practical usage of actor-network theory? (from Bruno Latour). I read [[Technology appropriation in a de-growing economy]] and they discuss a Marxist spin on ANT. For the purposes of appropriating technology from Big Tech for degrowth ends. And while I like all the words, I can’t quite get a grasp on what it really means and what you’d actually do…

LyX, my old friend. We meet again.

Webinar this Saturday 14th – Zameen Prapti Sangharsh Committee

Part of [[Conversations with Gamechangers]]. All the previous ones have been great.

"building a movement of Dalit (lower caste) landless farmers to reclaim access to land they are rightfully entitled to in the Punjab region of India. [..]building community power and making demands on the government for the rightful share, while developing collective forms of working the land and sharing the produce."

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/conversations-with-gamechangers-zameen-prapti-sangharsh-committee-tickets-392471923087

Knee-deep in papers on ICT4S – ‘ICT for Sustainability’. Usually well-intentioned, but often of a ‘tech will save us’ bent, missing any political analysis or question of how we got here. Case in point: the suggestion of ‘bayesian networks to discover supply chains using child labour’. Great. But better to transition to a system that doesn’t have exploitation of humans and nature as an ineluctable part of how it functions, no?

Dear #LazyWeb

Is there anything like #PlantUML or #MermaidJs but for circuit diagrams?

i.e. you define the diagram in text and then generate the resulting diagram as an image.

"political education is always a crucial feature of movement building. In the process of questioning society, movements will necessarily develop new concepts, new terminologies, new ways of thinking about the past, the present and the future. Generating such ideas and communicating them is an essential part of movement building."

[[Twenty-First Century Socialism]]

I had a dream last night that I can’t remember much of except that I really needed to find a very specific MIDI cable to make something important happen. Stressful.

Amazon workers in Coventry vote to go on strike in the new year. They were classed as key workers during the pandemic… but are treated like robots for low pay. Amazon has plenty money to go around.

> This time the turnout was 63%, with 98% of those backing strike action, marking the first time Amazon workers in the UK have voted to do so.

#Amazon

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/16/amazon-workers-vote-strike-coventry-depot-uk-first

Re-read [[Radical Technologies]] by @adamgreenfield@social.coop and it remains an absolute banger.

Thorough critique of the technologies you see bandied around as part of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ – smartphones, IoT, AR/VR, blockchain, digital fabrication, automation, ML/AI.

Fair, but mostly damning. And still right on point 5 years since publication.

The last two chapters on the Stacks, possible futures and tactics are gold.

Last but not least, it’s gorgeously written.