Federated communities that make decisions on consensus, with the fundamental rule that "those affected get to decide".
There's a lot more to it and there's a lot to unpack in just the above paragraph, but if the only alternative you can imagine is a global military dictatorship then it's hard to know where to even start explaining it to be quite honest.
Thanks, let me know how it goes!
I'm going to choose to take this as a compliment lol.
It's actually so much better now than it ever was. They've done so much to streamline the grind, especially with Mercer Spheres.
That's the first problem I address, but by the end I'm driving trucks full speed through the middle of my ultra dense mega factory production floor under a spaghetti canopy. It's a thing of beauty.
With your username I'm not surprised you're in cybersecurity lol.
And I never said all managers are bastards. I said that they act that way as a group.
Ultimately the incentive structure reinforces PMC workers who toe the company line. It could never be any other way in a capitalist framework. Yes, it's possible for knowledge workers to operate outside capitalist organisations, but they are going to have a harder time with less money. The bulk of the work will always be done where the money is. You see this very clearly in FOSS circles - the work involves people who are either too tired from their 9 to 5 to put a lot of effort in, they're the sort of person who can't work in a capitalist org, or they're paid by a capitalist org which will have certain demands on their work. The result is that FOSS tends to be rough around the edges which inherently reinforces the belief that only top-down capitalist structures can make polished software.
You'll find knowledge workers in general are going to be hard to unionise. They are better compensated and privileged so they have more to lose, and they have to adopt the ideology of their bosses to some extent in order to reproduce it in their work. We've seen union action with actors and writers for a long time, and it seems to be bleeding over from them into the videogame space. I hope it will keep spilling over into other technical spaces, but I don't think we can rely on that happening to fundamentally change the character of that class.
I thought I'd have to explain this part - the technical knowledge workers are also managerial, but in a more indirect way.
All three of the professions you listed make decisions about the function of the systems that workers use every day. They are responsible for taking the policy decisions that are made to serve the owning class, and giving those policies shape.
They literally design our environment, and as the Well There's Your Problem podcast points out, engineering and other technical decisions are political. The preferences of the bosses are built into them.
I guess this is pretty unpopular though. I guess there are a lot of knowledge workers on this platform and they don't like being compared to cops.
Caffene.
Sure, they are technically part of the working class, but they're similar to cops. Cops aren't the owning class, they take down a salary, but they're also class traitors.
The middle class - aka professional managerial class - as a group fulfill a similar role of keeping the rest of the working class in line in exchange for certain privileges. They just use paychecks and memorandums rather than guns and laws.
Also like cops, they provide an ideological shield for capitalists. Cops are overtly the "thin blue line" between "order and chaos". The middle class are a shield for aspirations. People are encouraged to identify as middle class so they think they have something to lose if they were to upset the status quo.
So it makes sense to identify this group, but too often it's as a shield. Like the implication in this article that a housing crisis for the middle class is a huge problem, but who cares about the housing precarity that's existed in the working class since its inception? Well one reason it would be a big problem for the ruling class is that they would lose their buffer. If it's just lords and serfs and a sharp distinction between them, then overturning the whole thing is a lot easier to contemplate.
Sounds like the work of saboteurs.
Unless you can demonstrate an actual harm that these people are doing to the cause, I am going to give them my support for doing SOMETHING. If it moves the needle a millionth of a percent in the right direction, tear down all the art galleries. We only have one planet.
Many of these cases have had jury nullification, which means a jury of twelve people who have been vetted to remove bias, all unanimously agreed to say "fuck you" to the legal system rather than lock up JSO activists.
That tells me that there is considerable public support for them, whatever you say to the contrary.
Edit: Here's a study about the actual problems facing the climate movement. Support isn't the issue:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-01925-3
Abstract:
Mitigating climate change necessitates global cooperation, yet global data on individuals' willingness to act remain scarce. In this study, we conducted a representative survey across 125 countries, interviewing nearly 130,000 individuals. Our findings reveal widespread support for climate action. Notably, 69% of the global population expresses a willingness to contribute 1% of their personal income, 86% endorse pro-climate social norms and 89% demand intensified political action. Countries facing heightened vulnerability to climate change show a particularly high willingness to contribute. Despite these encouraging statistics, we document that the world is in a state of pluralistic ignorance, wherein individuals around the globe systematically underestimate the willingness of their fellow citizens to act. This perception gap, combined with individuals showing conditionally cooperative behaviour, poses challenges to further climate action. Therefore, raising awareness about the broad global support for climate action becomes critically important in promoting a unified response to climate change. Global support and cooperation are necessary for successful climate action. Large-scale representative survey results show that most of the population around the world is willing to support climate action, while a perception gap exists regarding other citizens' intention to act.
The abstract of that paper says that the real problem is people's lack of awareness of how incredibly high the support for climate action is, because that informs how likely they are to act.
In which case, all this hand-wringing about which actions increase or decrease support is a red herring, because the support is not actually in danger.
I would suggest that the real problem is people who handwring about the support creating the perception that the cause is less popular than it is.
Description: A very overexposed image of a girl staring open-mouthed into a bright, cloudy, night sky, mid-flash as it is lit up by a meteor.
Still image taken from this IG video: https://www.instagram.com/p/C7JcDGXtORH/
Longer, unedited version with original audio: https://www.instagram.com/p/C7LrNlCNOmR/
She just happened to catch this meteor and her own reaction to it, entirely by accident. Absolutely watch the video, the shadows playing through the clouds as the meteor passes through the frame are stunning, but the most remarkable thing to me is this moment where laughing with her friends is interrupted and she doesn't yet know where to look. It's such a universal reaction and really special to see. This image is taken as one of the very bright flashes is blowing out the camera. Some frames are almost entirely white, others look much clearer. I chose a frame to make the subject legible but also give a sense of how overwhelmingly bright the flashes really were.
Description: An iconified image of a space helmet, with text underneath reading:
MURDERING ALL CITIZENS IS NOT REQUIRED.
No context has been provided.
Description: picture of youtube poll, mostly text
Kyle Hill
Schrodinger's cat is:
Alive -- 50%
Dead -- 50%
42K votes
Comments
I love how this community knew exactly what to do.
description
Text: WARNING
Icon of eye and crossed-out alligator
Text: PSYCHOPERCEPTUAL HAZARD DO NOT HALLUCINATE ALLIGATORS
Image of person holding up hands defensively towards an alligator approaching them from the water
Text: oh shit oh no oh fuck why did you do that you've killed us all
I've been searching for communities using https://lemmyverse.net, but lately every time I click on a link I get the error shown above (I've edited out my username because it's not really important). For instance the above error was shown when I clicked on the link https://slrpnk.net/c/imsa@lemmy.world
After I refresh the page I can see the content of the community, but I appear to be logged out. Then I hit refresh again and I log in, but sometimes the posts all disappear so the community appears to be empty.
Seems like something weird is going on here. I assume it's a bug. I'm happy to give any extra details you might need to figure out the problem.
EDIT: Turns out I couldn't see posts after logging in because my language wasn't set properly, and the other errors have disappeared with time.
So for instance I'm interested in all communities in the aussie.zone instance, and I can't find a way to use the search function for that. I've tried searching for communities using the search string "aussie.zone" and I get nothing.
Then in the screenshot shown I tried searching for communities with just the string "aussie" and I got "Aussie Environment@aussie.zone", which is strange because all the community names there contain the substring "aussie" and I'd expect this search to find them.
Is this a bug? Am I doing it wrong? It would be nice if there was a way to browse all communities in a given instance easily, because when I find an instance I like, I want to be able to go through and find the communities I like just as if I was browsing local communities on this instance.
Also the copy-paste method, which is still extremely clunky, is broken for me. I it just has [email protection] which when clicked does nothing useful. I've tried the Lemmy Link addon but not only is that also a very slow and clunky method which still doesn't let me browse by server, it keeps slowing down firefox so I've had to uninstall it.
Sure they can, that's why I said it was a suggestion. I've tried petitioning the devs to remove belt poles so you really, truly can't put them on the floor, but they said something about harrassment and then blocked me.