But I think your point reinforces the point of the article: since what you sell is meaningless, LLMs can be presented as “productive” because the fact they produce no meaningful value is irrelevant in the overall economic dynamic. I worked for a decade as a software developer and pretty much none of the software I wrote ever reached production with a meaningful number of real users. None of it was aimed at solving pre-existing problems. Software quality was only a performance to keep the devs happy. In those scenarios, an LLM would have had the same measure of productivity, because the actual software output was irrelevant: what mattered was marketing, sales, business relationships. For bigger tech companies now, what drives sales is lock-in, not quality, so also there the LLM productivity definition is irrelevant.

it’s a bit different: usually founders are in as much bullshit constraint as the workers. The power is all in the investors and the founders are just the boss clowns. The vast majority of them will fail, by design, leaving them burned out. They are not in the same position of workers materially, but psychologically they are not that far from a worker that wholeheartedly embraces the company mission and burns out because of the circus.

Don’t you think that generalizing to millions and millions of workers around the world based on a few interactions might not be great?

https://techworkerscoalition.org/

what’s your country?

Anticapitalism, and especially antineoliberalism, is not a monopoly of the left.

it’s the only place where capitalism does more good than harm for the average person at the moment.

the article is about workplaces where there’s little to none IRL interaction among workers, by design. Separation and remote work are one of the main challenges to organizing these days and you cannot dismiss them with a moralizing comment.

If you’re a descendant of German Jews or your relatives where somewhat involved in the holocaust, you pretty much get the citizenship automatically. There’s a lot of anti-zionist Israelis in Berlin

It’s a tech company not recognizing a union of tech workers, a dynamic which will impact the development of several pieces of critical software. I would say it belongs.

AI is not a technology, but a social process. Western AI marketing agencies use AI with a completely distinct meaning than Chinese state strategy documents.

It’s like comparing the dryness of turkey’s meat according to Americans with Turkey’s potential military threat according to Israelis.

mind that this is XR NL. XR UK is considered very… weird, despite being the original one. Chapters in other nations are very different

they got their headlines, so it works

they probably don’t want to be accountable for serious damage claims. They do it for people’s attention. To materially disrupt data center construction you need a lot more than a single action

yep, it’s one of the new chapters and it’s pretty active and growing fast. You should join.

you can volunteer in some alt-albor organization that supports unions externally, like Tech Workers Coalition: https://techworkerscoalition.org/

because unions are the wrong tool for the problem. If you’re unemployed, consider to reach out to WhatWeWill: https://wwwrise.org/

you can unionize with the rest of the workers. They are called “wall to wall unions” when you do not organize by department/profession but by company. In some countries they are the norm.

that’s why you do union organizing with organizers and not with edgy teenagers.

both coops and unionized companies operate within a capitalist structure and on the market (usually). Neither model can emancipate itself from its context. So I’m not sure about what aspect you expect to be different. And coops can be run with good governance where power structures are explicit, managed and democratically altered to reflect the values of the members. The case where you have few people controlling everything is a dysfunction, it’s not part of the model (and also can happen with unions).