Not directly to your question, but I dislike this NPR article very much.

Mwandjalulu dreamed of becoming a carpenter or electrician as a child. And now he’s fulfilling that dream. But that also makes him an exception to the rule. While Gen Z — often described as people born between 1997 and 2012 — is on track to become the most educated generation, fewer young folks are opting for traditionally hands-on jobs in the skilled trade and technical industries.

The entire article contains a buried classist assumption. Carpenters have just as much a reason to study theater, literature, or philosophy as, say, project managers at tech companies (those three examples are from PMs that I’ve worked with). Being educated and a carpenter are only in tension because of decisions that we’ve made, because having read Plato has as much in common with being a carpenter as it does with being a PM. Conversely, it would be fucking lit if our society had the most educated plumbers and carpenters in the world.

NPR here is treating school as job training, which is, in my opinion, the root problem. Job training is definitely a part of school, but school and society writ large have a much deeper relationship: An educated public is necessary for a functioning democracy. 1 in 5 Americans is illiterate. If we want a functioning democracy, then we need to invest in everyone’s education for its own sake, rather than treat it as a distinguishing feature between lower classes and upper ones, and we need to treat blue collar workers as people who also might wish to be intellectually fulfilled, rather than as a monolithic class of people who have some innate desire to work with their hands and avoid book learning (though those kinds of people need also be welcomed).

Occupations such as auto technician with aging workforces have the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warning of a “massive” shortage of skilled workers in 2023.

This is your regular reminder that the Chamber of Commerce is a private entity that represents capital. Everything that they say should be taken with a grain of salt. There’s a massive shortage of skilled workers for the rates that businesses are willing to pay, which has been stagnant for decades as corporate profits have gone up. If you open literally any business and offer candidates enough money, you’ll have a line out the door to apply.

Investment giant Goldman Sachs published a research paper

Goldman Sachs researchers also say that

It’s not a research paper; it’s a report. They’re not researchers; they’re analysts at a bank. This may seem like a nit-pick, but journalists need to (re-)learn to carefully distinguish between the thing that scientists do and corporate R&D, even though we sometimes use the word “research” for both. The AI hype in particular has been absolutely terrible for this. Companies have learned that putting out AI “research” that’s just them poking at their own product but dressed up in a science-lookin’ paper leads to an avalanche of free press from lazy credulous morons gorging themselves on the hype. I’ve written about this problem a lot. For example, in this post, which is about how Google wrote a so-called paper about how their LLM does compared to doctors, only for the press to uncritically repeat (and embellish on) the results all over the internet. Had anyone in the press actually fucking bothered to read the paper critically, they would’ve noticed that it’s actually junk science.

I think that’s a very weird interpretation of that, but fair enough :)

Just because a postcapitalist world should have a battery for every house does not make batteries in and of themselves solarpunk. The story surrounding the battery, in this case, the branding, is actually precisely what matters, because solarpunk is explicitly about speculative futures. It’s a genre of science fiction that creates an optimistic and green aesthetic to aid in imagining a postcapitalist world. Posting a link to a currently existing consumer grade technology with consumerist branding is, by definition, not solarpunk.

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” You’re posting the automobile. Science fiction is about the social context of the technology as much if not more than about the technology itself.

Again, I’m not saying that personal batteries are bad, or have no part in a postcapitalist future.

This kind of consumerist green-tech is not solarpunk. Solarpunk is about imagining a postcapitalist future, when human needs are met not just within ecological constraints, but as part of a healthy ecosystem, and technology exists to aid us in doing that. It’s about envisioning a radically changed world. Tools like these are the exact opposite end of green-tech: They’re specifically designed to fit neatly into our life as it exists today. The ad copy is super clear about that. The promotional materials even have an SUV.

To be clear, I’m not taking a stance on whether they’re bad or good, but I am saying that they’re not solarpunk.

That’s why I say that antisolutions are context-dependent. This is being presented as the solution to plastic, not as a clean-up plan after we have banned plastic, or even while we ban plastic. The former is an antisolution, while the latter could be a responsible project. Antisolutions are dangerous because they deflate the political will necessary to actually solve the problem, not because the technology is problematic in and of itself.

You’re always invited, and always fun to run into you on the other side of the fediverse from my perspective (I could never find a satisfactory way of using both lemmy and Mastodon on a single account that worked for me).

That’s such a great suggestion! I haven’t read it but will now, and I’ll get back to you when I do.

Okay here’s some wide-ranging suggestions, mostly focused on theories of change, as requested. A lot of it is authors whose views I don’t necessarily endorse, but I find their contributions meaningful all the same, if that makes sense.

• Erik Olin Wright’s “How to be anticapitalist in the 21st century.” It’s short. It’s easy to read, and makes a case against capitalism, for socialism, while sketching out a light revolutoinary theory. I actually don’t like his theory of change, personally, but I do respectfully recognize his contribution to the discussion as a clear-writing and insightful scholar.
• Rosa Luxemburg’s “Reform or Revolution and the Mass Strike.” I like Luxemburg. A lot of Marxists have many critiques of her theory, but no one can doubt her revolutionary practice. She and Lenin were contemporaries, and had many, many, many disagreements about socialist revolutionary theory, often writing in response to each other. I find their disagreements to be productive.
• Lenin’s “State and Revolution,” or maybe “What is to be done?” Lenin is not, in my opinion, a particularly compelling writer, nor do I necessarily endorse his politics. Frankly, he comes across as kind of an asshole. Still, I think that the modern anglosphere could benefit greatly from reading him, especially re: your “peace sign” complaint. Lenin writes with urgency about the issues that face him and his revolution. He’s completely fucking appalled at the state of the world, and to him, the injustice inherent to the status quo makes every single new day of it intolerable, so he is determined to do something about it now, not later. His clear goals, his urgency, and his complete commitment to an orthodox interpretation of Marxism are a wild combination of strenghs and dangers that come through very clearly in reading his work. In my opinion, Lenin is at his best when analyzing imperialism, though I’m suggesting things that have a theory of change right now.
• Huey Newton’s “Essays from the Minister of Defense.” Huey Netwon was a Black Panther. It’s challenging stuff, in a lot of ways, but I thought it might interest you given your previous comment.
• Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia.” When the fascists were taking over Spain, Orwell grabbed his gun and was determined to shoot them. The book is about his experience as part of the leftist resistance that was both fighting the fascists and running Catalonia.
• The work of Abdullah Öcalan, or anything else about the existing situation in Rojava. It’s super interesting and complicated, and not much discussed in the anglosophere. It was also greatly influenced by the work of Murray Bookchin, who I have somewhat mixed feelings about.

I have a ton more but this comment is long and I have to work so I’ll leave it there.

edit (can’t help myself): I also want to recommend the work of the various socialists involved in The International during the lead up to the first world war, like Trotsky, who I do really like and is a very strong writer, but also Lenin (this is what I was talking about earlier re:imperialism) and many others. This history was a big part of my own journey to becoming a socialist. The International saw what they called the “imperialist war” coming. They knew how bad it was going to be, and they tried to organize all the socialist parties in Europe to be disloyal to their national governments in favor of international peace if/when it came. There’s an alternative reality, much closer than many of us realize, where the parties that composed the international held firm to their commitment to oppose their national governments by any means, and WW1, one of the worst things that has ever happened, didn’t happen, at least not as we know it. Instead, the international collapsed as the parties folded to their domestic pressures. The lyrics to l’internationale talk about this commitment (formatting with code because I don’t understand how to make lemmy keep the newlines):

The kings make us drunk with their fumes,
Peace among ourselves, war to the tyrants!
Let the armies go on strike,
Guns in the air, and break ranks
If these cannibals insist
In making heroes of us,
Soon they will know our bullets
Are for our own generals

This is extremely based, and it was much more mainstream in the early 20th century than it is today. How much better would the world be had we kept this alive? Imagine if there were active major parties that prioritized loyalty to international peace before their own “national security” interests.

It’s all good that we say, let’s do this, but it’s how we get there. How do we topple the systems of inequality which prop up capitalism, because it’s not enough to say give up plastic and make a peace sign.

We learn and we organize. Speaking for myself, I started a worker cooperative and work in international human rights. I’m a member of many socialist organizations, some local and some international. I’ve joined more picket lines than I can count. I go to conferences, where I network with other socialists to start other projects and support each other. I’ve been part of local efforts against evictions, expanded police budgets, and so on, some of which actually won. It’s not a mystery, but it is hard, and we have to keep showing up and doing it.

Also, if I may probe, I think that your dismissive comment (“it’s not enough to say give up plastic and make a peace sign”), which clearly implies that I’m not doing anything serious, is telling. I think that you’re being defensive. Zizek (I think in “Sublime Object” but it could be in something else) notes that ideology, as he defines it, is something that we don’t see in our day to day life, but being forced to see it is a painful process, and we often respond defensively to having it challenged. Your current worldview seems to take for granted that no one (at least, no one serious) is doing anything meaningful to change the status quo, or even has a plan for how to change it, but that’s actually not true, so we end up in this strange situation where you think that saying the most superficial thing about the current state of the world is somehow explaining something to me.

If you’re actually interested in that question that you asked, and not just using it rhetorically, I have approximately ten thousand reading suggestions for you. I’ve already mentioned Gramsci and Zizek, but they can be a bit esoteric. There are also very good and very practical theorists of revolutionary change, many of which were themselves practicing revolutionaries.

What exactly does “practical” mean to you? To me, it’s just a manifestation of what Gramsci called “common sense” (“senso comune” in his Italian), which is itself part of what he called hegemony, or the mainstream intellectual/cultural ideas that justify the current regime. He argued that this common sense is the sort of popular philosophy that always surrounds us, which will always be uncritical of existing power, and that it’s the job of leftists to reject capitalism’s own notion of practicality because it cannot ever be practical to go up against the people who are deciding what is practical, by definition. Instead, we need to write our own version of practicality, because if we go around repeating the existing one, as you’re doing now, then we’re doing the work of entrenching it instead of opposing it.

So, for Gramsci, this feeling that you feel doesn’t mean that it can’t be done; it means that you’re suggesting something that would threaten the people in charge, because they’re the ones who get to define “practical.” It means nothing more or less.

There is nothing more impractical than destroying the only home for life as we know it. We literally have nowhere else to go. Banning single use plastics and nationalizing oil companies is so unbelievably convenient compared to the alternative.

In fact, revolutionary change is not just possible, but inevitable. It’s a question of whether we’re going to do it proactively, mitigating the harm that we’ve already done in the most just way that we can, or do it reactively. Either way, the day that enough of us wake up and decide to stop doing capitalism – and that day will come – it’ll stop, because labor wakes up every single day and makes capitalism happen.

“One thing that I immediately realized about the team is how passionate they are.”

🙄

This is an ad for a for-profit, publicly traded company that claims to have the solution for plastic waste, but also holds patents for said solution. Either they’ve found the solution, in which case, they should open source that shit because we’re in a global ecological crisis, or they’re exaggerating their claims and this absolute handjob of a video is uncritically repeating every single thing that the company’s PR is feeding them, without consulting a single other person.

Plastic waste already has a solution, and it’s a political solution. We could start by nationalizing all oil companies and banning single use plastics. Instead, we invest in a “solution” that, if it works as advertised, actually entrenches a perverse incentive for more plastic waste. Were this company to become hugely successful, they would lobby heavily against any bans of single use plastics, since it would ruin them.

This is what I call a technological antisolution:

We are asked to marvel at the shiny innovations brought to us by our technological superiors, and while we wait for them to solve climate change for us [or, in this case, plastic waste], we are given strategies to cope with the stress. Climate Change is thus transformed – or perhaps reduced – from a political problem to a technological one. I propose we name these kinds of technologies Technological Antisolutions.

A Technological Antisolution is a product that attempts to replace a boring but solvable political or social problem with a much sexier technological one that won’t work. This does not mean that we should stop doing R&D. A technology that is worth pursuing can become a technological antisolution depending on its social and political context. […] Technological Antisolutions are everywhere because they allow us to continue living an untenable status quo. Their true product is not the technology itself, but the outsourcing of our social problems. They alleviate our anxiety and guilt about not being active participants in political change, and for their trouble, founders and investors are richly rewarded.

Haha I was actually paraphrasing myself from last year, but I’ve seen that because lots of readers sent me that article when it came out a few months later, for obvious reasons!

I completely and totally agree with the article that the attention economy in its current manifestation is in crisis, but I’m much less sanguine about the outcomes. The problem with the theory presented here, to me, is that it’s missing a theory of power. The attention economy isn’t an accident, but the result of the inherently political nature of society. Humans, being social animals, gain power by convincing other people of things. From David Graeber (who I’m always quoting lol):

Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim.

In other words, just because algorithmic social media becomes uninteresting doesn’t mean the death of the attention economy as such, because the attention economy is something innate to humanity, in some form. Today its algorithmic feeds, but 500 years ago it was royal ownership of printing presses.

I think we already see the beginnings of the next round. As an example, the YouTuber Veritsasium has been doing educational videos about science for over a decade, and he’s by and large good and reliable. Recently, he did a video about self-driving cars, sponsored by Waymo, which was full of (what I’ll charitably call) problematic claims that were clearly written by Waymo, as fellow YouTuber Tom Nicholas pointed out. Veritasium is a human that makes good videos. People follow him directly, bypassing algorithmic shenanigans, but Waymo was able to leverage their resources to get into that trusted, no-algorithm space. We live in a society that commodifies everything, and as human-made content becomes rarer, more people like Veritsaium will be presented with more and increasingly lucrative opportunities to sell bits and pieces of their authenticity for manufactured content (be it by AI or a marketing team), while new people that could be like Veritsaium will be drowned out by the heaps of bullshit clogging up the web.

This has an analogy in our physical world. As more and more of our physical world looks the same, as a result of the homogenizing forces of capital (office parks, suburbia, generic blocky bulidings, etc.), the fewer and fewer remaining parts that are special, like say Venice, become too valuable for their own survival. They become “touristy,” which is itself a sort of ironically homogenized commodified authenticity.

edit: oops I got Tom’s name wrong lol fixed

Am alternative approach that may interest you: https://theluddite.org/#!post/reddit-extension

I have worked at two different start ups where the boss explicitly didn’t want to hire anyone with kids and had to be informed that there are laws about that, so yes, definitely anti-parent. One of them also kept saying that they only wanted employees like our autistic coworker when we asked him why he had spent weeks rejecting every interviewee that we had liked. Don’t even get me started on people that the CEO wouldn’t have a beer with, and how often they just so happen to be women or foreigners! Just gross shit all around.

It’s very clear when you work closely with founders that they see their businesses as a moral good in the world, and as a result, they have a lot of entitlement about their relationship with labor. They view laws about it as inconveniences on their moral imperative to grow the startup.

This has been ramping up for years. The first time that I was asked to do “homework” for an interview was probably in 2014 or so. Since then, it’s gone from “make a quick prototype” to assignments that clearly take several full work days. The last time I job hunted, I’d politely accept the assignment and ask them if $120/hr is an acceptable rate, and if so, I can send over the contract and we can get started ASAP! If not, I refer them to my thousands upon thousands of lines of open source code.

My experience with these interactions is not that they’re looking for the most qualified applicants, but that they’re filtering for compliant workers who will unquestioningly accept the conditions offered in exchange for the generally lucrative salaries. It’s the kind of employees that they need to keep their internal corporate identity of being the good guys as tech goes from being universally beloved to generally reviled by society in general.

AI systems in the future, since it helps us understand how difficult they might be to deal with," lead author Evan Hubinger, an artificial general intelligence safety research scientist at Anthropic, an AI research company, told Live Science in an email.

The media needs to stop falling for this. This is a “pre-print,” aka a non-peer-reviewed paper, published by the AI company itself. These companies are quickly learning that, with the AI hype, they can get free marketing by pretending to do “research” on their own product. It doesn’t matter what the conclusion is, whether it’s very cool and going to save us or very scary and we should all be afraid, so long as its attention grabbing.

If the media wants to report on it, fine, but don’t legitimize it by pretending that it’s “researchers” when it’s the company itself. The point of journalism is to speak truth to power, not regurgitate what the powerful say.

Whenever one of these stories come up, there’s always a lot of discussion about whether these suits are reasonable or fair or whether it’s really legally the companies’ fault and so on. If that’s your inclination, I propose that you consider it from the other side: Big companies use every tool in their arsenal to get what they want, regardless of whether it’s right or fair or good. If we want to take them on, we have to do the same. We call it a justice system, but in reality it’s just a fight over who gets to wield the state’s monopoly of violence to coerce other people into doing what they want, and any notions of justice or fairness are window dressing. That’s how power actually works. It doesn’t care about good faith vs bad faith arguments, and we can’t limit ourselves to only using our institutions within their veneer of rule of law when taking on powerful, exclusively self-interested, and completely antisocial institutions with no such scruples.

I don’t really agree with this. It is the answer that I think classical economics would give but I just don’t think it’s useful. For one, it ignores politics. Large corporations also have bought our government, and a few large wealth management funds like vanguard own a de facto controlling share in many public companies, oftentimes including virtually an entire industry, such that competition between them isn’t really incentived as much as financial shenanigans and other Jack Welch style shit.

Some scholars (i think I read this in Adrienne bullers value of a whale, which is basically basis for this entire comment) even argue that we’ve reached a point where it might be more useful to think of our economy as a planned economy, but planned by finance instead of a state central authority.

All that is to say: why would we expect competition to grow, as you suggest, when the current companies already won, and therefore have the power to crush competition? They’ve already dismantled so many of the antimonopoly and other regulations standing in their way. The classical economics argument treats these new better companies as just sorta rising out of the aether but in reality there’s a whole political context that is probably worth considering.