yeah, I conveyed a similar feedback to the author of the article. Thanks for the analysis

what’s wrong with the title?

I don’t understand your downvotes. If they are from scabs, or they are from people who only read the title and thought this is some managerial shit.

because I joined a long time ago?

ok, scab

We have plenty of text-based community platforms, depending on the country you’re in. It’s all stuff that will be presented at the call.

We are throughout USA and Europe. I can give you personal advice as someone who emigrated, and you might want to ask the question in the community chats of different chapters, but TWC is for collective action, not for individual career support

we have our own self-hosted infrastructure for critical data. We use Zoom just to passively filter FOSS purists and hackerinos. (jk, not true, we do it because the infrastructure group prioritized other things, but it works anyway)

we don’t take dues and we are not an union in a legal sense. Requirements: time, energy, and motivation to learn and contribute. You’re going to get trained on things once you join.

Join our community space before the 101 if you like: https://techworkerscoalition.org/subscribe/

nerds are often egotistical, selfish and individualistic. Let’s kick them out and unionize instead

So the author’s argument is that youth have just gone to gig work instead of traditional jobs. OK, maybe true, but first of all, this is not a good thing on its own either. And secondly, we have to consider why gig work even exists, aside from being a fresh new way to exploit workers and deny them the traditional protections of the labor market. Because there is a specific reason gig work exists right at this very transitional moment in the workforce, and I’ll give you a spoiler: It exists because of AI.

Considering the author is possibly the most relevant scholar on (against?) platform work, I’m quite sure he would agree with you. The article implies that AI is deskilling and displacing workers and that’s intrinsically a bad thing.

It’s Germany, they have labor rights that they want to uphold. This is a so-called “warning strike”, to signal that there will be collective legal action if they get fired without abundant severance pay.

Basically TikTok doesn’t want to negotiate with the union and the union is showing that there’s support for collective legal action instead of a 1-on-1 dismissals that would cost the company way less. The company has an interest in negotiating because it’s quite sure to lose the legal battle.

Here “replace” doesn’t mean “being able to do the same job”. It means you get fired. Automation in most fields never even tried to get close to a level of quality comparable to what a human can do, but it was enough to displace a majority of workers.

The author is a machine learning engineer, so he’s perfectly aware of the limits of whatever is called AI. The point is to make those limits irrelevant by lowering the expected level of quality, as it happened with textile, food, and so on.

Most people don’t know they are allowed to dream, let alone in which direction. While this might not connect with you, there are millions of tech workers who have zero perspective on what’s out there.

The market doesn’t reward quality.

The vast majority of people I know has no cooking skills, no time to cook or no energy after work. Pretty much all the middle-class and lower-middle-class people in this group order delivery for most of their evening meals. The people who 10 years ago were eating microwaved food, now order out: it costs a bit more, but it’s definitely tastier.

that’s not how information and journalism works, but ok bro, keep believing in “objectivity” lol

Your opinions are all influenced by the outside. The distinction is just between influences you ignore/accept and influences you reject. We are not born with opinions.

The outcome is responsibility of the whole environment. This project didn’t come out of nowhere.

It’s not just who’s doing but who allowed it. If somebody murdered children in my hometown I would hold social services and mental health services responsible for that.

I live in Germany and I’m not from the USA. It has nothing to do with the USA. Many Germans do want this genocide to happen and they still defend it. It’s a daily lived experience, it has nothing to do with online discussions, let alone with Americans. Germany doesn’t have the same concept of military-industrial complex like the USA (even though they might have started rebuilding it recently), but universities do research to enable genocide, like many universities around the world.

I’m Italian, and Leonardo does the same with universities in Italy, using young naive researchers to build weapons used in Palestine or by other undemocratic governments throughout the world.

I don’t get what’s so weird to you: universities have alwasy been complicit of horrible stuff.