Technology cannot be disentangled from society and the economics that create and develop it. Technology is social process, it is not a technical matter.

The idea that technology is a thing on its own, maybe even with its own agency, is an ideological stance pushed first and foremost by the people you don’t want to hear about exactly for the purpose of obscuring their role in the whole deal.

You should start the union

Pitting different types of workers against each other automatically promotes you to a scab. Purism and sectarianism are much more harmful to labor organizing than union busting.

I’m a union organizer in tech. My downvote was the 8th, not the 1st. I was busy doing a call with striking riders in Greece. Keep up the good work, scab.

Quit this bullshit. A lot of tech workers working remotely are contractors, precarious workers. Content moderators, data labelers, and the likes are not paid 6 figures and they are not privileged. Most of the workforce of these companies are not white, rich dudebros. Stuff like this adds insult to injury.

Well, nutritional science doesn’t have a great track record. While a lot of bullshit is justified using the word “holistic”, it is also true that nutrition and in general our metabolism are affected by so many factors that a reductionist approach to nutrition more often than not fails to give actionable insights, especially if you move away from very broad statements. It doesn’t help that every few years, some core concept of nutritional science is discovered to be the result of lobbying.

you’re right. Saucers (despite the English name) are meant to drink beverages, therefore they are small glasses, not small plates

None of this put a dent in CO2 emissions, because more energy available just means more energy consumed. These are distractions, especially EVs. For the sake of how livable the planet will be in 50 years, all these efforts had a negligible effect.

The current trend of governments abandoning mitigation strategies in favor of adaptation is a testament to the irrelevance in the overall response to climate collapse. The “green transition” is just a way to sell more and produce more.

You’re implying advocacy can beat financial and industrial interests on critical topics, something that goes against what we have been witnessing for a while.

For that, I’m already collaborating on activisthandbook.org and I curate my own lists of content. What I see social bookmarking is good for is circulation of less structured knowledge, short-lived information (i.e. about events or courses), news like publication of relevant books and so on. Wikis take a lot of effort to curate and are the last step of a process of information discovery and processing from certain environments that starts somewhere else. Lemmy or other social media can work at an intermediate level between personal knowledge and structured, consolidated knowledge shared in the commons.

What are your goals, how will you achieve them, and how will you maintain cohesion?

My goal is to build more effective political organizations. I abandoned my career to do this as a consultant, I do this as a volunteer for the orgs that cannot afford me, and I do it in the orgs in which I’m politically active first-hand. Building communities of experts and people interested in improving, on a global scale, is part of the process.

To me, it seems you have an idea and a lot of resistance to joining anything that has existing problems.

There are effective orgs with problems and there are orgs with no chance of having a positive impact because they spend all their resources reproducing themselves. No problem joining the first kind, but I don’t believe there’s a point beating a dead horse with the second.

One of the biggest obstacles facing this idea in the long term is how organizing is usually very specific to local problems, so most information that would be shared is only relevant to a single campaign at a specific point in time.

I’m not American, so campaign organization is not really the frame I’m immersed in. I do a lot of organizing with Americans, so I understand the context, but if you want to build a political org that can last a century and it’s able to evolve and fit changing needs, that kind of know-how is generic and reusable. There are intrinsic dynamics of how humans behave within organizations and how organizations grow, and anything pertaining to those aspects is knowledge that is transferable and can live a long time. If you build for the short-term, you are subject to the ebbs and flows of the current moment and your impact will be short-lived. I’m not against this way of doing things, but I just don’t find it interesting or ambitious enough.

Conversation about democratization jumps from the 1920s IWW to 2000s Ver Di

A suspicious amount of my peers are past-IWW members who are now part of VerDi, lol.

I think you’re a bit confused here, Democratic Centralism and the Mass Line are organizational principles. They are primarily for party structure, not only mass societal structure, and Liu Shaoqi’s work is on behavior within orgs. Any union, political party, etc. can and would benefit from learning these and discussing them.

Fair enough, but I don’t believe mass parties can be built anymore without a mass society, so it’s stuff I don’t really read about because again, it’s not really actual or usable.

Is there something specific you are asking about? Like, how to file for specific legal status or something?

In other spaces like the ones I would like to find on lemmy, the areas that get discussed are stuff like organization design, process design, software and software practices, facilitation, mediation, consensus building, effective communication and so on and so forth. You know, the stuff you need to build an organization that is effective in the world.

Indeed context matters and a lot of knowledge cannot be transferred across domains, legal frameworks, or even outside an org. Nonetheless a lot of this knowledge is indeed transferable. How to effectively facilitate a meeting can have culture-specific details, but most of the know-how is transferable. To discover which software is best to adopt to build a CRM is a discussion that can be had before knowing any specifics of your org, and when you know the specifics, you can apply what you know about CRMs to pick the best one. Organizational models can and must be discussed across orgs and countries, to understand if some problem is just an accident or a model is fundamentally unfit for a specific goal.

I was thinking more about practical knowledge to employ today, rather than political speculation on hypothetical societal/political structure. I need people to get better at facilitating meetings, tracking tasks, and writing notes. Until then, discussing democratic centralism is sterile escapism.

Indeed, but these seem to be mostly focused on political topics, rather than organizing per se. I’ve rarely seen content about organization design, facilitation, effective communication, process design or other similar topics. It’s usually sociology/economy/political theory stuff for what I’ve found.

The lemmy users have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it.

I’m not talking about organizing on social media platforms. I’m talking about learning, sharing expertise, and interesting material on how to build organizations.

I’m part of many local orgs and I’m not talking about “organizing over social media”, but rather to discuss the topics surrounding the practice and theory of organization building with other people interested in the topic and practicing it.

I’m one of the people organizing such activities, not within a union but through a similar dynamic. While that’s a great way to build capacity and know-how, it’s very narrow and slow to evolve. There’s plenty of research and discussion on how to build democratic organizations more effectively, and this kind of discussion doesn’t happen within a single org. When it does, it’s often very disconnected from reality and uninteresting. This kind of know-how can totally be circulated through social networks (not necessarily social media, but also) when the exchange is on topics of interest on a global scale.

Actual org work is handled in orgs.

I fundamentally disagree. This mindset is why so many leftist orgs still operate through processes, governance structures, and methodologies invented when the horse was the main vector to transfer information. There are plenty of spaces to become better at organizing, and digital spaces to exchange expertise and grow are important.

because the techniques, practices, assets, learning material and so on should circulate and the format of social bookmarking platforms like lemmy is good for that.

I have several telegram groups, discords, facebook groups, and slacks, together with traditional forums hat collect people from all over the world interested in organization building, facilitation, strategy development, tooling, and so on and so forth. On lemmy though, there’s very little and it’s a pity.