offer people what AI cannot offer: relationships, fun, belonging, relief. If your political organizing is less enjoyable than talking to a chatbot, people will stick to the chatbot.

for me it is freely accessible. I didn’t know there was a paywall

can’t promise I will have time to read it, but feel free

this feels a lot like a rediscovery of constructivism?

ah no yeah, I agree, you can only experience the reflection. The Real punches you in the face but you don’t feel the punch, you just wake up on the floor without recollection of what happened.

There is a Real beyond our perceived reality, which is independent from observation, but doesn’t seep through the observation. Anything that reaches the conscious mind stops being objective. The Real is experienced only when our reality is shattered by an intervention of the Real. In scientific terms, the internal consistence of an epistemology doesn’t bring you close to the truth, but it just makes itself more resistant to the Real. Eventually the whole paradigm is shattered by something that cannot be encompassed in the epistemology and you can assume what was left outside is the Real intervening. Once the epistemology is consolidated, the bounds of what you can know are already set and are not objective, but depending on the epistemology itself, which is always partial.

People don’t use forums anymore. Union organizing requires big numbers and being comfortable with being visible.

The URL shortener for sure could be addressed and I invite you to join and contribute to improve that part of the stack. Nonetheless, TWC is not a hacker space or a space for tech experts. You need to use the tools people already use and meet them where they are at. Using niche tools people are not familiar with introduces friction and barriers, that filter out people without tech skills, or without the attention and time to learn a new tool and incorporate it in their routines. Most tech workers are not programmers, remember that. Also people who are too privacy-focused and tech-focused tend to be bad organizers: union organizing implies risks and exposure, and you have to be comfortable with that, while privacy-focused people want to minimize individual risk by staying hidden. For sure privacy of your communication from the employer or the government plays an important role, because it might give sensitive information to your enemy, but if retaining privacy prevents you from having impact, it’s pointless to even start.

I’m part of TWC and the organization of this call and I’m Italian. There are different timezones but it’s obviously hard to include all of them. Including UTC wouldn’t help most people.

The very fact that there are two events for two distinct timezones doesn’t suggest there’s an attempt to reach out to a bigger crowd?

Because self-hosting adds complexity and friction, something that impact-oriented organizations might not be able to afford. TWC uses self hosting on more sensitive data anyway, just not on these tools.

The Global chapter of Tech Workers Coalition

The Session A time zone is good for Europeans too. Session B I guess could work for East Asia.

Why do you see this as USA-only?