I'm wondering what's involved in setting up a worker-run cooperative and keeping it running; who here as experience working in such a cooperative?
What were you doing? How did it go? Did it pull in enough money to pay the bills? What were the conflicts in organizing it? Do you still work there? What were the major challenges? Was anything surprising about the process of it all?
Boosts very appreciated!
Tomorrow Vercel is updating its terms to use your code and agent chats for AI training and third-party data sharing. So we just wanted to remind you that the CEO of this company openly aligns himself with Netanyahu.
Here's quick guide on how to opt-out or even better: how to migrate off Vercel.
https://updates.techforpalestine.org/vercels-ceo-likes-war-criminals-now-he-wants-your-code/
September 2025. Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, poses smiling next to Benjamin Netanyahu at a private AI tech meeting in New York. The photo goes viral within hours. Employees resign. Developers cancel their accounts and migrate to competitors. Enterprise contracts get terminated. The backlash is immediate, loud, and widespread. But
Researchers found that common nitrile and latex lab gloves can shed stearate particles that closely resemble microplastics, potentially "increasing the risk of false positives when studying microplastic pollution," reports ScienceDaily. "We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be ...
After the Republican midterm disappointments of 2022,
Peter Thiel called for a party that could unite “the priest, the general, and the millionaire”
— a formula that reads, with hindsight, as a precise blueprint for Trump’s second administration:
Christian nationalism, military force deployed at home and abroad, and a financial oligarchy powerful enough to steer the state.
By the election of 2024, the gospel of nostalgia and the gospel of progress had concluded a short-term bargain to elect Trump.
The result is the rise of an oligarchy of fewer than 20 American families.
The first clear sign that the promise of the digital commons had curdled came with Edward Snowden’s disclosures in 2013,
when Americans learned that Google and Facebook had opened their back doors to the security state.
What had been marketed as an architecture of connection revealed itself also as an infrastructure of monitoring.
By the mid-2020s, the fear had hardened into habit.
A 2025 YouGov survey found that nearly a quarter of Americans admitted to censoring their own posts or messages for fear of being watched or doxxed.
Surveillance no longer needed a knock at the door.
The mere awareness of a watching eye did the work.
What had been a public square had become, almost imperceptibly,
a panopticon of self-restraint.
Into this apparatus stepped a new class of private overseers.
Palantir, the data-mining firm Thiel co-founded, grew from a counterterrorism instrument into a generalized engine for correlating personal information
— tax filings, social media traces, the bureaucratic exhaust of ordinary life.
Insiders warned that data citizens had surrendered to the IRS or Social Security for basic governance could be recombined for far more intrusive purposes.
The point was not simply that we were being watched,
but that we were being rendered legible
— sorted, scored, and classified in ways invisible to us.
As Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times,
the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure is effectively nullified by AI:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/rise-digital-oligarchy-ai-era-1235534437/
...what frightens them is the idea that they might have to just short-circuit the whole system and give away the energy so their people don't storm their houses and string them up.
Why is that scary?
Because if they can make energy free for a month, they can make it free permanently, and people know that.
Joe Biden, for example, had free healthcare and no evictions and a small UBI and guaranteed time off from COVID, but knew if he didn't scuttle it quickly USians would get used to it.
So, are we putting together openstreetmap group excursions this summer or what.
Finland suspends a plan to move its election platform to AWS, opting to remain on domestic servers through the 2027 general election, as trust in the US frays (Kati Pohjanpalo/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-24/finland-shelves-plan-to-move-election-platform-to-amazon-servers
http://www.techmeme.com/260324/p24#a260324p24
"On behalf of 25 other member states, Belgium called for a 'no action motion' to block the proposal. Pakistan and Chile were the only two member states to vote with the U.S. against the motion, with 23 countries voting to block the anti-trans proposal and 17 abstaining…"
United Nations rejects U.S. effort to erase trans women: "It stops here" - LGBTQ Nation
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/03/united-nations-rejects-u-s-effort-to-erase-trans-women-it-stops-here/
Floaty Birb
Tech For Palestine
Slashdot 
Chuck Darwin
The Tennessee Holler 
Jason Lefkowitz
John
mhoye
Techmeme
Mercedes Allen