I know people that occupied the offices. They were perfectly aware they would be fired and the people selected for the action were the least vulnerable economically, because retaliation was certain. Anything else is journalistic spin.
solarpunk is inherently utopian. Utopias exist to inspire and to reflect on the present. It tells us that there can be a social system in which technology is good, but then if to be optimistic or not is very subjective. Many pessimistic people like utopias exactly because they highlight the ugliness of reality.
That’s exactly how eventually you are going to get Trump. Voting the lesser evil always, inevitably leads to the major evil. I live in a country that already elected fascists with this same logic and US is going to follow soon.
everything that has happened so far has happened under a dem administration. 40+k deaths and endless displaced. Stop being delusional, dems are genocidal and you’re guilty too.
why? how? how do you rationalize this when the Biden administration is openly endorsing and supporting genocide? How could Trump make it worse? Write racist slurs on the bombs sent to Israel?
The core difference between longtermism and solarpunk is that longtermism stems from an utilitarian frame, while solarpunk rejects it. Radical utilitarianism like longtermist fashos and oligarchs gives them a way out to commit the worst crimes against humanity because of a supposed good that will materialize in a distant future. It’s a moral free pass, exploiting the life of future humans (who cannot protest) to justify the oppression and exploitation of current humans (who are indeed protesting these assholes).
Solarpunk and longtermism are in no way on the same spectrum.
Techno-optimism has always been used to criticize this attitude, together with techno-chauvinism. Techno-utopianism is a less loaded term that might encompass more positive visions of technology, like the attitude towards space exploration in the 60’s coming from the soviet union.
“Optimism” in general is not necessarily the term we want to reclaim from the right: it’s wishy-washy, boring, mediocre. “I’m not going to do much, I’ll be on autopilot, because tech is good and it will sort stuff out. I don’t care too much about taking a position, beyond passively trusting tech”. Optimism is the happy trust of a dog on a leash going for a walk.
you use “luddite” as if it’s an insult. History proved luddites were right in their demands and they were fighting the good fight.
we do, and anybody telling you “it’s complicated” has an agenda.
Please yankee, don’t make everything happening in the world about you
Gnosticism is by definition the epitome of duality. That said, conflict with a reactionary entity doesn’t imply you’re not reactionary. Russia and Ukraine are at war with each other and they are both very reactionary, becoming even worse due to the needs produced by such conflict.
Also, hackers tend to hold libertarian (in the European sense) values and that’s how they pick their targets for direct action. When I say they are reactionary, they are reactionary in effect, not in intent. That makes them even more problematic, because it’s not immediately obvious what’s the problem.
It would be quite a long argument, but I suggest TechGnosis by Erik Davis and this article: https://www.are.na/block/24206425
tl;dr: hacker culture is grounded in gnostic, individualistic californian hippie culture, and shares root with what is now the dominant, reactionary ideology of big tech moguls, ketamine cryptocolonialists, business white supremacists. One key tenet of hacker culture is the power of the individual super-human brain power to reshape entire societies through the production of disruptive technology. Mr. Robot tv series is one such example of said mindset. It preaches the superiority of the world of minds and the virtual over the material. The material is subject to the virtual and the virtual is where the real stuff is happening, where there’s a real confrontation of power (the hacker vs the system, disruptors vs established businesses, out-of-the-box thinkers vs corporate drones). This mimics gnostic beliefs very closely. It is reactionary because it is individualistic, because it erases material conditions and collective action, but it also just operates from such a simplified worldview that it is impossible to adhere to if you have a very basic understanding of disciplines like sociology, history or politics. It’s just not how the world works.
I have a few. I’m not the kind of person that says controversial things to attract attention, but I also don’t refrain from putting them out there.
A selection of the ones I use in my political activity:
Some others:
Edit: people down voting in a thread about controversial opinions must be very very intelligent
We: Italians, Spanish, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Vietnamese, South Asians, Japanese.
Barbarians: everybody else, especially the French
You clearly haven’t met a Southern European. We divide the world in civilized ass washers and uncivilized smelly barbarians
I use Notion+Notion Calendar for this and I delegate to it a lot of stuff: bureaucracy, booking the barber, changing the bedsheets, all my work, birthdays, etc etc. How can people trust their brain with more than two or three items is unfathomable to me. I mean, when I was younger I could keep in mind a dozens upcoming appointments and go through them every few hours to make sure I wouldn’t miss anything, but as soon as your routine is disturbed by work stuff, it’s impossible.
Months? You clearly haven’t tried Pyanodons.
Jokes aside, yeah, it would be a killer.
mastercard sends your transaction data live to banks. They sell your data to third parties for marketing, profiling and the likes. Credit score is the least of your problems.
I know because I developed a system, in a major European bank, enriching their transaction data with mastercard data for live, predatory marketing.
nah, you will attract only those that already kinda agree. All the others will see weirdos with weird ideas, weird clothing and weird vocabulary, approaching them in the street or promoting events that they don’t care about.
“talking to people” is something I do since I’m in union organizing and the way people react to the same arguments varies wildly over time. After the waves of layoffs in the tech sector, non-politicized tech workers are incredibly more receptive to pro-union rhetoric, in a way that would have been impossible before.
About accelerationism: I’m not saying failing an election is a necessary step in a teleological sense. You should enter elections to win them, if you do it. Nonetheless it is useful to radicalize people. It is a recuperation of what is perceived as a defeat in a system in order to feed a different system. Electoral betrayal is useful, but not necessarily something you should strive for, as an armchair accelerationist would claim. There are better ways to spend your time and energy imho, but if it happens, it is still good manure for growing the seeds of something new.
because it’s in Latin (or Italian)…