As a software engineer I’m not sure this should count as a real job, most of the time.

The skill is certainly valuable and yes creating software can be creating something new and useful but often, and probably for my whole ‘career’ so far, it’s creating versions of things which already exist (how many chat apps you got?) or making unhelpful and unnecessary changes to existing software in order to justify continued sales and subscription (rent, basically).

Real software, useful software, is not like physical goods. If I build you a table, that table now exists and provides value where no table had existed before. A second new table will require additional labour and will provide additional and unique value upon completion

Proprietary copy-restricted software, on the other hand, is a con. If I create a piece of software for you, the only thing stopping that single creation from providing value to everyone who needs it (copy+paste) is our laws and the threat of violence that goes with them. This keeps me employed, but the job has become bullshit. It’s no longer a value-add.

In my experience this is most software engineering jobs today.

What’s the rush? With everything, I mean.

I’ve always wondered.

meditation a thought came to me during meditation as it tends to do and I thought a thought contained in front of me like a sphere in a void not lived in but with in a vast expanse where I swim

Straight parents clutching their pearls and demanding they know more about what’s good for LGBTQ+ youth than the LGBTQ+ adults who have been through this shit already

YouTube just seems so ubiquitous at this stage that “just don’t use it” doesn’t feel like an option. It’s too close to “don’t consume culture” and how dare anyone put a fence around that. (Not that YT are the only ones doing it).

But I absolutely think that advertising is harmful to a person and for society and the ad-driven business model is wrong and needs to stop. If YouTube can’t survive without me watching the ads then I’d prefer it didn’t. It’s ubiquitous now but not irreplaceable.

This week I’ve been mostly reading/watching/listening about #anarchism, largely via David Graeber interviews, related content, and looking up Irish Anarchy groups (not many!). Also been reading Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs’ and I don’t know how I’d managed to avoid it until now; this shit is exactly my jam. Like I say this stuff all the time, I should have read this ages ago.

I think Graeber is a bit too narrow in his definition of BS jobs though.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

His criteria for bullshit jobs depends heavily on the workers perception, whether or not they feel it is a bullshit (pointless) job, and he doesn’t really try as much to assess the job in terms of its actual utility to people.

I think many people don’t realise how unnecessary their job is or could be, for instance, if it were not for imaginary copyright laws and the associated threat of violence or harm which prevents us from openly sharing ideas, software, and other tools.

Jobs which exist because “competition is healthy and leads to innovation”.

Evolutionary methods try to simulate what an anarchist society might be like, but revolutionary tactics, which have historically taken a violent turn, aim to overthrow authority and the state.

• Wikipedia

Libertarian socialism is an anti-authoritarianand anti-capitalist political current that emphasises self-governance and workers’ self-management. It is contrasted from other forms of socialism by its rejection of state ownershipand from other forms of libertarianism by its rejection of private property.

• Wikipedia

I used to be a proponent of a rosy sci-fi view of exploring the stars and the importance of expanding human “civilisation” because… well, you just gotta, I guess!

I don’t know if it’s my age or just the apparent state of the world but I’m much less enthused and actually probably quite opposed to it now. Listening to Jeff Bezos talk about the grand undertaking of humanity that the likes of Blue Origin and Space-X are partaking in to build habitable space-stations and moon-basses and I’m just like… why, though?! Where do you think it is that we all need to be in such a hurry?

Alright so we’re running out of resources and burning the planet alive with all this crap we’re producing… but half the time it feels like we’re only producing this shit so we can afford to stay alive while you’re spending billions and trillions on space rockets!

Learning to love the winter months

for turning inward

and not toward a void or introspection

but a world that I can conjure

unchecked by stimulation

of any source

in isolation

Ever have an experience that seemed to impact the past as well as the future? Like thinking of earlier events, the memory of them is now so coloured by it that it feels as though the earlier memory couldn’t exist without the later experience. What is time anyway.

Ridding myself of the algorithm, mostly.

No Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.

Firefox web browser. uBlock Origin.

Kagi search.

Subscribe to YouTube channels, use the subscriptions tab.

Enjoy the fediverse. Social by nature, connected communities not customers. People not content.