UnseriousAcademicJul 18, 2024

The Nation: Silicon Valley is fully MAGA-Pilled

https://awful.systems/post/1932535

The Nation: Silicon Valley is fully MAGA-Pilled - awful.systems

Seeing a sudden surge in interest in the “Tech Right” as they’re being dubbed. Often the focus is on business motivations like tax breaks but I think there’s more to it. The narrative that silicon Valley is a bunch of tech hippies was well sown early on, particularly by Stewart Brand and his ilk but throughout that period and prior, the intersection between tech and authoritative politics that favours systems over people is well established.

Show threadCodexJul 18, 2024

My career curve from naive and vaguely libertarian computer programming intern to radicalized full-stack anarchist has taught me that most people in this industry are just the worst. Deeply insular people with massive chips on their shoulders, genius and martyr complexes, fully bought into this idea that the “nerds” should be in charge.

I can’t stand talking to most people in my field. They are so myopically focused on either whatever computer puzzle is in front of them or whatever overcomplex scheme of cryptocurrency, third-tier stock options, and investment portfolios they fantasize will make them rich too. The outright worship of tech moguls and their money and their “big ideas.”

The dirty secret is that tech people have always sucked. The radical thinkers, the FOSS people who put careers on the line so people could have functioning computers, those saints who believed computers could actually improve the lives of human beings, those true heroes of the field continue unsung, unfunded; they were always the exploited minority in computing.

Show threadV0ldek

vaguely libertarian computer programming intern to radicalized full-stack anarchist

I just have to ask, is full-stack here referring to the programmer path, or is it “full-stack anarchist”? If the latter, I need an explainer of which part of anarchism is the back-end and which the front, and also where can I find the job postings.

Jul 18, 2024 at 8:48pmWeb
Show threadCodexJul 19, 2024

Haha, sadly just full-stack dev, just wanted it to sound cool!

Now that I’m thinking about it though, is front end vs back end useful specialization or a kind of implied hierarchy? (True anarchist programmers never even use trees because we don’t believe in hierarchy!)

As for the job postings, someone was seeking members for a gamedev co-op on Lemmy the other day! Maybe the anarchist jobs are coming soon!

Show threadnickwitha_k (he/him)Jul 19, 2024

As for the job postings, someone was seeking members for a gamedev co-op on Lemmy the other day! Maybe the anarchist jobs are coming soon!

Oooh! I’ve contemplated similar myself in the past. Have a link by chance? I want to see what they’re doing and how they plan to organize.

Show threadCodexJul 19, 2024

I had essentially the same reaction. Tech shops are hard to unionize (see above for why, hah) but I think “joint equal ownership” as rebranding for starting a union shop is a good approach to poaching some people out of the capitalist system.

Anyway, here’s the post:

lemmy.sdf.org/post/19592490

Game Dev Group is Looking for Additional Members - SDF Chatter

We are Ludo Ex Machina. We are a group of aspiring game developers with leftist political beliefs; we are mostly anarchists or anarchist-adjacent. Ultimately, we’d like to incorporate as a worker-owned cooperative. Since forming, we’ve written a code of conduct and established some barebones internal moderation procedures. We’ve set up some services on one of our member’s personal servers for the group, and we could set up more/different services if we decide we need to. Currently, some of our members are putting together a single player space racing game in Godot. While we already have a lot of relevant and complimentary skills in the group, we find that there are a few gaps that could stand to be filled. * We need 2D and 3D artists. We have one artist, but their time is split between this and another project, and they will have to disappear for a while after they are done with school. * We need at least one developer with project management/software development process experience. The one developer we have who currently has this experience in a collaborative context has been too busy to help us with this. We have one other developer who is familiar with software development process, but they have primarily done solo development work previously. * We would like to recruit a couple of developers who are comfortable with engine-level development, preferably in Rust. The game engine situation is kind of bad for indie devs right now. Unity and Unreal come with licensing agreements that large corporations can change whenever they want (and Unity has recently made clear that the enshittification has begun in earnest). Godot has technical problems all the way down to the core and a hostile contributor environment. Bevy is technically and culturally the right thing, but it is young and under-developed. Ultimately, we would like to invest in Bevy as our long-term engine pick for game development, but to do that effectively, we’d like to have a development team which is capable of working around the engine’s immaturity. * We could use an experienced creative writer. Although various members of our group do have some creative writing skills, none of us have experience working on any large creative writing projects. Some of us have expressed an interest in doing some sociological storytelling in our games, so experience with this style of writing would be a plus. Feel free to comment if you have any additional questions. Anyone who is interested should send me a DM.