I’m all for reforming our current work system, but we need organized action. Can we make that happen here? Or is there a different community for that?
That’s a good question. If you don’t mind, I’m going to use the “Speak as moderator” button here (although i don’t really know what that does).
I see a few things necessary to reform the current economic system - let’s call it Awareness, Advocacy and Action:
- Awareness means getting people to realise that the corporate propaganda they’re hearing isn’t the whole truth.
- Advocacy means going out and telling people to join the cause, form a local union, etc.
- Action means taking organized action - writing to politicians, organising dialogues and strikes, etc.
I’m completely open to using this community for any and all of the above. When we have a good critical mass of users, we can all vote on this, and I’ll abide by the consensus.
In the meantime, however, we need to get more people to rally behind the cause. We have ~500 subscribers here from all over the world in a variety of jobs. That’s not nearly enough to do any sort of Action. All we can do in the meantime is Awareness and Advocacy. That means posting memes and screenshots, that means posting news that counters corporate propaganda, that means posting news about organised action taking place elsewhere that we can celebrate or contribute to.
If anyone disagrees, please share your opinions here, I’m totally open to suggestions, criticisms, insults even.
I think “speak as mod” adds a red “mod” logo (kinda looks like a shield) next to your username. That’s it, as far as I can tell - it doesn’t pin the post or highlight it or do anything else.
ah cool thanks!
I’ve had some heavy ideas about this.
Random chance actually means it is very likely there are random clusters of users even in small groups who are closer together than others who could do more locally together. Some kind of mechanism to help figure out if we have a critical mass of protestors/mutual aiders/whatever (without giving away those protestor’s names) for a project would be a good idea, and wouldn’t necessarily have to be very complicated. Maybe a single page that just asks for location and what kind of project you are interested in?
There are also some forms of work that lend themselves really well to being online. Coding, writing, news, encouraging people to vote, sending money to workers on strike. I firmly believe the most effective way to combat unethical companies is simply to start and support worker owned companies where every employee gets a vote on their wages, and ‘starve’ the big companies. I found myself looking at the massive amounts of money raised and wasted in political campaigns by single dollar donations and found myself thinking - damn, with a million dollars, you could start a really small company with that. The second most effective way is probably striking, which, yes, you need people on the ground for that.
We could use an ethical version of Amazon, with a collective of shops that people can visit (the offline side of warehousing is a whole other bundle of issues), and an ethical Paypal. I know that credit unions exist, but I don’t know of any credit union that has a Paypal-like API and easy convenience of simply clicking to pay for things. Uber and other apps. There is a huge amount of labor that we could ‘take back’ simply by providing another venue for people to practice it. Unfortunately, I don’t think the fediverse way of doing things is quite appropriate when it comes to systems dealing with money. It’s one thing to duplicate posts or ads for content for sale, but you don’t want to duplicate credit card information. Open source it maybe and use ‘semi centralization’; the Paypal-esque site can handle logins and money, and the Amazon-esque sites can perhaps do some form of federation and handle actual showing of items.
TLDR: it is definitely possible to do quite a bit online, and I think work reform has some avenues via it that have been severely under-utilized and neglected in the information age, as we tend to think of action as just being about protest. Protests can certainly be useful, but should not be our sole course of action if we want a paradigm shift. I find it extremely striking that when most people talk about action, they almost always mention protests and strikes first, if they mention anything else at all.
I actually had a much longer post, but it complained it was too long. So I think I will make my own thread.
