Cory Doctorow on the split appeal of tech
Cory Doctorow, Mass tech worker layoffs and the soft landing:
For many technologists, the allure of digital tools is the possibility of emancipation, a world where we can collaborate to make things without bosses or masters. But for the bosses and masters, automation’s allure is the possibility of getting rid of workers, shattering their power, and replacing them with meeker, cheaper, more easily replaced labor.
That is one depressing truth. This split has had a dampening effect on the enthusiasm of my latest Job Search. But on the bright side:
That means that workers who go from tech firms to firms in the real economy might be getting lucky – escaping the grasp of bosses who dream of a world where technology lets them pit workers against each other in a race to the bottom on wages, benefits and working conditions, to employers who are glad to have them as partners in their drive to escape Big Tech’s grasp.
That also matches up to what I’m seeing. The more interesting “tech” jobs for the last few years have been in automating and empowering other domains. Tech itself has been ever more obsessed with eliminating workers and making whoever’s left dependent on them.
Activity Log
hackers.town: 2023-03-24 Fri 08:12
@mwl @thegibson “Spandex: it’s a privilege not a right.”
hackers.town: 2023-03-24 Fri 08:30
@ovid of all the frameworks to dominate front-end — why’d it have to be React?
Oh well. I guess it’s inevitable that I’ll spend some time learning it as well.
hackers.town: 2023-03-24 Fri 08:37
@ovid My first answer would be Vue. The developer experience there is what React proponents describe but I’ve never seen.
The React experience must be sort of like how we talk about the dwimminess of Perl and other folks just see chaos.
But for what I actually use? htmx.
hackers.town: 2023-03-24 Fri 09:21
Coming up the stairs while Mrs Geek goes down them. I go full Gandalf.
“You Shall Not Pass — unless you smack that ass!”
I may have taken some liberties with the source material.
Anyways, she passed.
hackers.town: 2023-03-24 Fri 10:02
In the ebb and flow of ActivityPub usage, seeing some vocal ebbing.
Is that even a word?
Anyways some folks going back to Twitter. Not me. I never left. I need a site that can consistently make me hate life and the people who make that site.
Used to be FB, now it’s Twitter.
hackers.town: 2023-03-24 Fri 11:04
Used to be able to at least get news from Twitter, but search & discovery is so bad these days I went back to Reddit.
hackers.town: 2023-03-24 Fri 12:36
@bitprophet weather and local are still a gap. Reddit’s got local for nearby metro areas (Seattle / Tacoma), but my particular suburb wasn’t well-served by Twitter even before Elon.
and not not a big trend. Just a couple folks that felt compelled to announce their bounce.
hackers.town: 2023-03-24 Fri 12:52
@genehack @ovid Svelte gets a lot of love, but I have not yet used it enough to have strong opinions for or against.
hackers.town: 2023-03-24 Fri 13:06
@perigrin @genehack @ovid I’ll never understand how JavaScript handles math.
hackers.town: 2023-03-24 Fri 13:24
@genehack @perigrin @ovid one of those threads I would love to share with @IamMrsGeek but I’d have to explain so much and then I’d have to wake her up
hackers.town: 2023-03-24 Fri 13:54
Trying out an idea in Obsidian with Canvas and the Homepage plugin.
hackers.town: 2023-03-24 Fri 14:02
@antijingoist Similar but less focused in intent. More of a general purpose concept map like Heptabase or Kinopio.
hackers.town: 2023-03-24 Fri 14:33
@yenzie @gizmomathboy @genehack @ovid and htmx is a 1985 Mercedes 300TD running on biodiesel that always smells like french fries and / or Thai food, and requires you to pop the hood to turn the engine off
hackers.town: 2023-03-24 Fri 20:36
@fortyseven that works for me. I always saw the ghost sheet as a shroud, and those pieces fit together.
hackers.town: 2023-03-24 Fri 21:32
want to look up a thing on the Arch wiki, can’t remember the URL, go to my favorite search engine, and —
the next few decades are gonna be rough
STOP BEING SO DAMN “HELPFUL”
anyways at least i can disable that
hackers.town: 2023-03-24 Fri 22:25
@genehack I don’t recall opting in but we know how excitable I can be.