hex

Raised by wolves until I was old enough to know better. XML weapons specialist & digital locksmith.

I know things are bad, but we can make them better.

Half of what I post is just me repeating what QTBIPOC comrades have said in my whitest cisthet voice.

Fuck fascism and cars.

Typo catches and clarifying questions always welcome.

searchable via tootfinder.ch

Cybernetic Disaster Anarchist

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nprofile1qqs9pp3prjznq2vh9dfat6jw5hwlr3awa5cvldszcpwm7urxuuweycspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dslynspq

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Last Notes

2026-10-31 05:17:23 UTC

Perhaps a useful map for these troubled times.
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/117/533/812/917/177/572/original/5263291849132003.png

2026-10-26 07:58:33 UTC

You should absolutely celebrate Lula's victory in #Brazil. But if you're doing that and not celebrating the global insurrection against the neoliberal order, you are either a coward or a fool.
#nevent1q…etzx

2026-10-23 21:08:57 UTC

We are in a very dangerous time, when "AI" security companies are competing to prove that their technology will provide returns on investment. The industry has always been broken. There has always been an incentive to inflate the importance of vulnerabilities, but there was always a risk of burning hard earned trust. In the end, a lot of folks decided it wasn't worth it.
But "AI" companies haven't worked to earn that trust. They have something to prove, right now, or they don't exist. So now everything is critical, "impossible to find without AI," and so on. Blah2shell sells, and now everyone wants their little vuln labeled that way regardless of the complexity or risk.
Burning trust in security is the absolute worst thing you can possibly do in terms of tech. I'm worried about where things are going right now.
There have always been more bugs than we can fix. We've had to triage. If we break that, we flood maintainers until they burn out. Our job is not to fix everything. It's to filter information for the people who do.
But right now I'm reading vuln reports that aren't distinguishing between a 100% reliable and trivial exploit like log4shell and complex memory corruption bugs that are incredibly noisy and basically impossible to exploit with ASLR. ASLR is like 25 years old. You have to do better than a simple buffer overflow now to get a shell.
But people have shit to sell, so we have more noise. Again, "we've put the attenuator on the wrong side of the equation."

2026-10-17 10:30:04 UTC

I think there are some pieces missing here. Hosting does scale down poorly, but it only scales poorly because of how we host. There *is* an increased cost and complexity to shutting down small sites. If we can change the way we host, make it easier to replicate, then there *is* an asymmetry. It was technically as simple as pushing buttons to shut down A/I, but it was not politically as simple. Forcing them to build a case to shut down every little site *is* a different order of complexity. It's easy to confuse the technical and the political. We should not be so naive.
We need to focus on making hosting easier, on simplifying the complexities, on building open federations (like Co-op Cloud) focused on sharing resources to make distributed systems more viable.
More importantly, self-hosting vs collective hosting doesn't change the impact equation. If repression can cleanly target it's victims, then repression wins. Resistence that works is resistence that forces the oppressor to attack people who aren't otherwise aligned. This radicalizes unaligned people into the resistence. Every victory by the agressor must be made pyrrhic.
This is done by mixing hosting. Stop hosting anarchist only sites. That makes an easy target. Host sites that help people. Provide free hosting for liberal orgs, for churches and temples, make the headline say, "church websites shut down in counterterrorism campaign." Start from the assumption that there will be a crackdown, write headline that would be the most damaging to the enemy, and work backwards.
It's time to learn some insurgency theory for fuck sake.
And about that cybernetic legibility thing. It's definitely one element to consider, but I don't think the zine really dug in as much as I'd like. Reducing legibility may mean dropping offline. The state has been tooling itself around controlling the Internet. Moving radical activity offline forces state forces to retool. That increases complexity.
But there are other methods of decreasing legibility. There are a lot of radical things that the system struggles to or cannot intepret as radical. This is why I advocate for centering disaster anarchism, community building (setting up tool libraries and community pantries). A small group of people can increase the complexity such that they absorb much of the capacity of the repressieve apparatus. But that doesn't really matter unless society is organized, invisibly, to leverage that opportunity.
Anarchism is not blowing up police stations. It is building systems of mutual coordination. That can be invisible, or illegible, to the system.
Cybernetics is all about control. The adversary of control is complexity. If you are resisting control, your goal is to make it as complex as possible to stop you. That doesn't mean "we should all take this new strategy" but, as hinted at but not made explicit in the zine, that we should *all agree on objectives but all apply multiple different strategies*.
#nevent1q…l7u9

2026-10-06 08:27:43 UTC

A couple of billion years ago, cyanobacteria evolved the ability to photosynthesize. Suddenly they could turn the abundant atmospheric C02 into carbon for replicating themselves. The only side effect was the release of oxygen.
It was a monumental success, but it ended up turning Earth's C02 centered atmosphere into an Oxygen centered one, leading to what may have been the first great extinction event. Cyanobacteria still exist, but they are no longer the dominant life on Earth.
Some things that thrive in one environment also change that environment such that they destroy the resource they need to thrive. We're seeing this today with #LLMs They were only possible to create given massive amounts of clean human-generated content. As they dump their memetic effluent back into the data they feed from, they produce statistical distortions that degrade models trained on the same data. Like the cyanobacteria, they poison the air they breathe.
I encourage everyone to think in terms of systems, not simply components. Because, though this lens, it becomes obvious that some systems include within themselves the logic of their own collapse. And, like a Greek tragedy, it is often precisely a system's strength that leads to its collapse.

2026-10-02 06:58:05 UTC

Capitalists: "People are driven by greed. They won't work without some kind of personal incentive, like money."
Ok, cool, but do you know what "a baby" is?

2026-09-24 04:12:18 UTC

There's a bit of context behind this that's worth being aware of, and I'll do my best to explain it second (or third) hand. Abiy Ahmed has been the prime minister of Ethiopia since 2019. He was quite popular initially, but has held on to power for quite a while and has been called out for authoritarian tendencies.
His party, the Prosperity Party, is a liberal party that has privatized parts of the economy and is trying to dismantle ethnic federalism. This type of "modernization" is obviously supported by neoliberal forces around the world, especially since he took over from the ethno nationalist ML TPLF.
The TPLF was also authoritarian, brutal, and anti-democratic, as one would expect from an ML organization. Part of Abiy's popularity came from opposition to the TPLF. But more recently, but his forces also carried out genocide in Tigray during that war in 2022 (after his Nobel Peace Prize).
Part of the opposition to his modernization is that ending ethnic federalism would weaken the power of older ethnic structures. This could be seen as similar in some ways to conflicts across Europe in from 1848 through to the early 1900's and in the Balkans after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The connection between ethnicity and nationality has never really stopped causing problems. Liberalism is usually connected to the domination of one ethnic group into a singular national identity. This flows from the French Revolution, through the Russian revolution, and into both the Ethnic ML exported by Communist Russia as part of their attempts to weaken European capitalism and (via both American Colonial Nationalism and the French Revolution) into the Neoliberalism promoted by the US and European powers as a counter.
Ethiopia is a multiethnic country. Unfortunately the logic of the state (liberal or communist) tends to destroy these ethnic identities through a combination of ethnic cleansing, appropriation, and (often forced) integration.
Some of the conflict here is coming out of the tension between a national identity and ethnic identity, especially in relation to Tigray and Amhara, as well as the continued pressure of economic liberalization, and centralization vs federalization.
The point is that it's actually quite a bit more complicated than it may be presented as, especially outside of the religion. European interests may align with Abiy, and present him as a "modernizing force." Addis is one of the centers of the African Union. Meanwhile, other countries have their own interests in stoking this conflict. China, Turkey, the UAE, and Iran all sell drones to the Federal government. Eretria has an interest in creating a buffer zone to keep Ethiopia from seizing a port city from them. Sudan is involved, and I don't have the local political depth to know why.
Various groups will try to point to one group or another as the "good guy/bad guy" but it's definitely not that simple. It's just kind of tragic for everyone. I hope Ethiopian people find peace and freedom.
My hope is that Ethiopia will develop something like Democratic Confederalism that resolves these conflicts and tensions without wiping out the unique identities of the peoples who make up Ethiopia.
#nevent1q…q5zu

2026-09-07 19:19:17 UTC

My partner and I send memes back and forth. Yesterday she sent me the first. Today I ran across the second. No, it's real. You can check for yourself.
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/117/231/354/751/101/364/original/b31a54c1ee9ba526.jpg
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/117/231/361/133/465/975/original/2c7cbf3452406441.png

2026-08-26 09:29:02 UTC

I'm gonna bump this again because this is part of what I've been talking about for a long time. The state is withdrawing. People are suffering because the system they depend on is collapsing. We have an opportunity to fill that gap.
If we do what the state can't, we do more than a thousand arguments ever could. We show people what we're actually talking about. We show that systems built for people can actually work. More importantly, we can actually help people who need help.
This is mutual aid. As the polycrisis continues to compound, there may well come a time when you need services the state or capitalist markets used to provide and they aren't there. By building power in the face of failure, you improve your chances that someone else will be able to do the same for you.
#nevent1q…shrq

2026-08-08 09:56:08 UTC

This is exactly it, and the reason projects like https://coopcloud.tech/ are so important.
#nevent1q…62ps

2026-07-31 07:19:27 UTC

Before I got shot, I was trying to figure out how to organize against Trump. I found out about the Twin Cities GDC. They had made it relatively easy to organize a GDC chapter. We were working on getting chartered when I got shot.
Twin Cities GDC sent people to help us get Greater Seattle Seattle GDC off the ground. One of their folks helped my partner make sure the house was secure. They gave all sorts of training. We used their "GDC in a box" zip file that had everything you needed to get started (dues forms, meeting notes templates, etc).
When I got out of the hospital, I ended up talking with Erik a few times. I have a *huge* amount of respect for him.
This is the real threat: support, cooperation, organizing. It's not about militancy. It's about organizing. The fascist state wants to destroy people who build. That's the whole point.
He is a threat because he has worked tirelessly, for years, against countless challenges, to make things better for people. That is the thing that cannot be.
#nevent1q…9rlh

2026-07-27 16:58:44 UTC

If you want to know what Rubio is trying to do, go listen to the Revolutions podcast on 1848. Metternich built a conspiracy of kings that persecuted Liberals in order to protect European empires against revolution. It failed, of course, but he was able to hold things down (right until it all blew up in his face). The strategy was essentially mass surveillance, censorship, and general Draconian repressieve bullshit.
Rubio is trying to slap together an actual international conspiracy of governments to stomp on the face of humanity forever, and his opening offer is off-brand 70's fear mongering that no one takes seriously.
He may well be right, in some ways. The thing he calls "civilization" is white supremacist patriarchal Christian nationalism, modeled loosely on Pinochet's Chile, Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, and Putin's Russia. Yeah, "the left" is a *huge* threat to that type of shit. In fact, we always win.
But Rubio is Dollar Tree Metternich, and he's not trying to stop a liberal revolution near the birth of liberalism. He's trying to stop a leftist revolution that's been refining itself now against these same tactics for hundreds of years.
We already have the playbook he's using (poorly). It's just funny that the famous Marx quote about history repeating, "the first as tragedy, then as farce," is so applicable to this Rubio as he rails against the laughable boogyman of "Marxism."

2026-07-25 16:26:31 UTC

Move slow and fix things.

2026-07-18 14:11:04 UTC

I keep seeing the "cars replaced horses" thing related to "AI."
People keep comparing "AI" to cars (positively) without thinking about the fact that cars were forced on people (AAA bought up and destroyed tram lines, there were massive protests, etc), and are the primary driver of climate change that is currently on track to make complex human society impossible. Meanwhile, cities that weren't destroyed for cars, or that have reversed most of the damage, are some of the most desirable places to live.
Maybe we could take the car analogy as a warning. Maybe it could be a reminder to think about how forcing technology on people against their will can reshape society in a profoundly negative way.
The answer for cities has been to right-size transit. Eliminate cars wherever possible, maintain emergency vehicles and mobility aids, and find more efficient alternatives (bikes, trams, metros, and trains) where possible. I feel as though we can extrapolate from the metaphor.
We do not have to repeat the mistake of reshaping society around a single, oversimplified, solution in order to benefit a tiny minority. Perhaps we can actually choose the right technologies based on use cases, rather than hype or dogma.
Cars didn't replace horses. Cars replaced walkable cities, tram lines and mass transit, and children playing in the streets.
"Cars replaced horses" to the benefit of a small group of elite men, at tremendous cost to literally everyone else. When people say, "AI is the new 'cars replacing horses'" they are saying something very specific about their privilege and intentions.

2026-07-13 19:09:39 UTC

When this specific phase of history is over, and, perhaps, we've turned NWDC into some artist space like Seattle's Inscape, we'll put a statue of Willem in the center of the garden where those buses once were. It's not something he'd probably have liked much, but memorials aren't for the dead. They're for the living, to help us remember what to aspire to.
#nevent1q…3axt

2026-07-03 19:39:09 UTC

Obligatory 4th of July post for all who celebrate
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/857/728/230/881/885/original/cadfbba060f1351f.jpg

2026-07-02 21:34:04 UTC

The thing about training an #LLM on human culture and then renting that culture back isn't that it's "Intellectual Property Theft." There's nothing wrong with sharing. There is something wrong with framing LLMs as piracy. That's a completely different concept.
When a powerful group of people takes the writing, the art, the music, various parts of a culture and then make some bland reproduction that lacks all the meaning and essence in the original, then those powerful people profit off that mess while the people who made the original stuff are erased, marginalized, and made to suffer, there is a different term for that.
The term everyone is looking for is "appropriation."
I'm not saying this is the same as other forms of cultural appropriation, but there are definitely enough shared elements that we should revisit that conversation. Perhaps some folks who thought the idea was silly when the idea first came up may feel differently now.

2026-07-02 07:40:30 UTC

There is more to #SolarPunk than solar panels and bikes. What we are talking about is being part of a living world. The hegemonic culture is one of hierarchical domination.
But many of the the cultures that hegemony suppresses bring a vibrancy to life. I don't buy yeast from the store, sealed in a plastic packet, a coffin for a living thing. I feed my sourdough. I am obligated to it, in a relationship with it, as the culture is reliant on me for it's survival. It speaks to me, with smell and color. I must pay attention. I have to learn it's nature, how it grows and eats at different temperatures informed by different times of the year. Mushrooms, yeast, kiefer, plants, independent things, things I can't control, life that is intertwined with my own.
But even my #bicycle speaks to me, which is something I hadn't considered until reading this and thinking about that framing.
It is not simply that "we need a different economic system." What we are talking about is a fundamentally different interpretation and experience of the world, from the hierarchical structure of death to a web of life, where even "inanimate" things become imbued with agency.
https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=2936873&post_id=151655646

2026-06-07 04:19:04 UTC

- reply

The good side of this is that there's a hijack-able data stream that anyone can use to poison LLM training sets, and they can't do shit because it's on *your* network.

2026-06-07 04:08:28 UTC

But if *I* hijack *their* devices it's a "felony."
https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/the-smart-tv-in-your-livingroom-is-a-node-in-the-aiscraping-economy/

2026-06-06 13:53:55 UTC

I had an interesting chat with a friend who mentioned a book called "The Living Company." Apparently Shell was one of the few companies that saw the 1970's oil crisis coming and was able to adapt. They did it by talking to a bunch of people randomly about the future, identifying patterns, and coming up with possible future scenarios. They then formed clear plans for these future scenarios, where those plans would cover as many related scenarios as possible.
This was actually really familiar to me, though I hadn't read the book, because that's very close to what the Seattle GDC disaster prep committee did. We identified possible disaster scenarios, then identified preparedness steps that served multiple purposes. We got boxes of n95 masks in 2018 and 2019 for wildfire smoke and did a bit of work building box-fan air purifiers. Over the years we handed out these masks to houseless folks who were most exposed to the smoke. When the pandemic hit, we were able to take some of those boxes to first responders just as manufacturing in China dropped because of their lockdowns and as others started PPE hoarding. We focused on N95 because that was one of the overlap points between the unexpected but catastrophic "flu pandemic" that we knew was possible, and the regular "wildfire smoke" problem we were just getting used to.
The book sounds like it's at least partially influenced by cybernetics. There's this Dutch cybernetics connection that I haven't quite figured out. Anyway, this guy talked about how a company needs to be sustainable and all that. My dude, you worked for an oil company. That is categorically not sustainable. All this aside, I think there are a lot of things we can and should take from capitalists (or take back, in some cases). This practice is one of them.
So maybe get together with friends and talk about what you think might happen. We live in a world of crisis, so I'll always recommend disaster preparedness. But there's more than that.
What do you think will happen in the next 5 years?
Assuming that happens, what actions would you take to push that towards the most positive outcome?
I'm listening to Revolutions and reminded of how much effort monarchies put in to preventing revolutions. Corporations can be even more advanced in their planning and preemption. What would it look like if we planned like that?

2026-06-03 08:06:06 UTC

The thing I love about computers is that I can tell you basically anything about how a computer works, not because I know everything but because I know how to figure it out. I can walk you, over the course of an hour, two, there, maybe more, though every step of typing something into a web form, from the electrical signals that get turned into digital via an ADC, to the USB controller memory, to the kernel driver, to user space, through the application stack, back down to the kernel, to the network driver, through routers, up the server stack, TCP/IP, key exchanges, etc.
I don't mean I have the time to dig into these things. I used to, and it was fun. I've given more than my fair share of interviews talking though variations of this. What I'm talking about isn't pure knowledge, but that, given relatively simple theory, and the right tools, every action of a computer can be understood down to the limits of physics.
The thing I hate about #LLMs is that take something comprehensible and make it something almost completely opaque. Even with a solid understanding of the theory, literally no one understands what's happening. That is shit. It makes playing with technology not fun anymore. The way in which companies are making things even more opaque by running stuff in the cloud is everything I hated about closed source on steroids.

2026-05-24 08:11:17 UTC

Why is the US government investing in huge AI data centers? What's the value even? This...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16800

2026-05-22 05:10:51 UTC

The security industry is somewhat unique. It's probably the only industry created by the worker as a threat. If you talk to hackers who were in the scene before Operation Sundevil, you'll realize that it's always been a Bullshit Job.
Folks in L0ft and cDc were hacking companies and basically blackmailing them into paying for their services. Operation Sundevil "straightened up" the industry. Some people went to prison, some people build security services companies. Pretty much anyone who actually believed in the manifesto was locked up or edged out.
Using the Graeber framework here, hackers are partially duct tapers and partially goons. The critical thing here is that the industry was basically created to give money to people who would otherwise destroy the system.
Neuroatypical folks have always been forced to the margins of society, but computers gave us a super power. Now we were extremely dangerous. Tech, especially hackers, have always been paid a lot to minimize the risk of developing a class consciousness.
Graeber talked about this. Kings and nobles would often find some job or title that they could bestow on potential enemies in order to keep them close, to defang them. What better role than sheriff, a type of goon, for a rebel?
We turned it in to a whole thing. Not only did hackers make their own industry and force everyone else to accept it, we even created a whole parallel box ticker industry of "compliance" as a side effect.
The Hacker's Manifesto was decontectualized and made a fun artifact of the past. We were sold a story of "good hackers" who "protected grandma from the bad hackers." But the whole industry always existed to keep us on a leash. The funny thing is that it was a leash that we made ourselves.
But now we're seeing massive layoffs in tech, even in security. Now that we're this far in, everyone has forgotten the history. Leadership doesn't understand what security people do, so they think that LLMs can replace us. But the people in the industry now, the ones who came to it as a career, don't understand the history.
There was always a split for these weird outsiders, these people who couldn't fit in to the system but now had power over it. Some wanted in and they were willing to use extortion to get in, and others wanted to destroy the system to set everyone free.
Operation Sundevil, and the industry that evolved out of it, existed to neutralize those revolutionary elements by offering extortionists a safe entry. Extortionists trusted the capitalists to not stab them in the back the same way capitalists have stabbed everyone in the back through all of history. Now my LinkedIn feed is full of Meta layoffs, and I wonder if that class consciousness is starting to click for anyone yet.

2026-05-18 20:55:27 UTC

I'd like to remind anyone calling for a new Neurenberg Tribunal that the original one was only necessary because Germans didn't respond appropriately to the evil shit Nazis were doing, when they were doing it. The tribunals essentially asserted that the German people would have been justified in using any force necessary to stop the Nazis, and that all who didn't try to use such force were complicit.
Sit with that for a bit and ponder the implications.

2026-05-17 07:17:41 UTC

Motohegemony requires a very specific set of conditions to exist. It relies on an incredibly complex supply chain, and a fragile framework of political and financial support. Leaders have been largely competent (though, perhaps, malevolent), and have prioritized systemic stability over all else.
The conditions that made that system viable have collapsed. Your best bet to avoid being consumed by that collapse is to fight for bike infrastructure and mass transit, and to abandon cars as much as possible.
You will have to adapt to a life without cars. There is no question of "if" that will be necessary, but "under what conditions." Will you choose the time, or will the time be chosen for you?
#nevent1q…r4pz

2026-05-14 20:45:13 UTC

- reply

"AI is going to replace a lot of jobs."
Ok, what do you think is gonna happen when you stop paying the "don't riot" bill? How long can you go without paying that bill before an angry mob is gonna come to collect? You can tell from their vacant eyes that they never considered that.
They're gonna go in their bunkers... And then what? They all care about getting into the bunkers and never consider that the doors can be welded shut and the vents filled with concrete.

2026-05-14 20:37:53 UTC

LLMs can do a lot of the work people are tasked with doing on a regular basis, because a lot of the work people do is bullshit. The majority of what we do isn't to achieve any goal, it's a way to distribute just enough wealth to keep things calm while keeping us all too busy to actually make things better.
We aren't paid to make stuff or do things. We're paid not to riot. Elites used to know that. The fact that they've forgotten how the machine works is evident in its current implosion, and will only become more obvious as they forget the one thing that actually keeps them safe.

2026-05-09 07:36:11 UTC

I really want a podcast that mixes anarchist academic papers and interviews with their authors with real projects from around the world and interviews with organizers and agitators in a single content stream.
Anyone know if anything like that exists today?

2026-04-14 09:22:08 UTC

- reply

The most important among these is abolishing subsidized car parking, but with gas prices already driving prices up this is probably less critical than building out appropriate transit infrastructure.

2026-04-14 09:15:53 UTC

@Crimethinc's "The Sound and Fury of a Collapsing Order" hit the nail on the head. This is exactly the time that things can change. The ways in which they change matter.
Petroleum is the primary pillar of the global order, and weakening it's grip weakens that order. As an anarchist, I'm obviously more focused on direct action but there are absolutely local policies that are also important.
Attacking car-centric infrastructure as a political issue makes it easier to change other things.
#nevent1q…ys40

2026-04-12 06:55:51 UTC

I wanna jump one more time on the whole "distraction" framing, because this is a point that needs to be hammered home (and I need a reminder to write something longer).
Attacks on trans youth are not a distraction from other types of coercion, they are central to it. Attacks on trans youth come from a conceptualization of children as property, which is literally patriarchy in the Roman sense of the legal objectification all people who share a household as belonging to a man. This legal structure, Roman slave law, continues to be the root of property rights and therefore the foundation of capitalism.
But colonialism also extends from it through the infantalization of colonized people as a justification for oppression. This can also be turned inward again manifesting as the justification for police (that is, some people "can't handle themselves and need external authority to act right").
The #Epstein stuff isn't some weird thing that rich people get away with, it's core to how wealth works. Money isn't useful by itself, it's a proxy for power. One manifestation of power is being able to violate laws that constrain others (this is the "freedom of the monarch" that Graeber talks about in Dawn of Everything). The war in Iran, especially the threats of nuclear weapons and genocide is not a distraction from the #EpsteinFiles, but rather a manifestation of the same thing.
Power must be demonstrated to affirm that it is real. War is a demonstration power. Violating the law without consequences is a demonstration of power. The most taboo things are using nuclear weapons and child sexual abuse. He has already done one of those, and he is going to do everything he can to do the other.
These are not distractions, these are all manifestations of the underlying thing that we need to fight. But we need to make sure we're fighting it as a single thing. We have to tie these things together, because if we do not then we risk reproducing the same thing again but worse.

2026-04-10 13:20:12 UTC

Consider this an official motion to drop the term "anarchist" and replace it with the term "consensualist" so as to leave less room for oppression to masquerade as "freedom."
https://hexmhell.writeas.com/consent

2026-04-10 10:08:19 UTC

#DearLazyWeb ( #Nederland #HamRadio edition): I have small kids. My oldest is just turning 7. I have an idea of starting to introduce radios to them and some other parents are also interested.
I'm starting with walkie talkies and basic radio protocol. My thought is to try to play a few games of "keep talking and no one explodes" over walkie talkie, then trying to expand that out into an informal radio net or something. I have some other ideas for projects, like downloading weather satellite data or something (but I think this may be a bit too advanced, perhaps).
I've also been thinking about playing a bit with LoRa radios (meshcore or reticulum), but I haven't yet figured out an application that would be fun for kids.
One parent suggested a kids radio broadcast. In the US it's possible to get a local FM license (within about 2 kilometers) for community stations and educational use and such. Is there any similar program here in NL?
Extra question for #Ham operators: are there other simple kid friendly projects you can think of?
For parents (to gauge interest outside of my weird little circle): one goal here is getting kids into radio to build the next generation of disaster communication. Is this something you would be excited about for your kids? Is this something you would be interested in seeing as an after school program?

2026-04-08 11:51:12 UTC

I can't overstate how dangerous this is for those protestors, or how important their work is.
#nevent1q…eeqa

2026-04-08 11:24:24 UTC

I don't feel like I need to translate this for Americans #USPol #NLPol
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/368/814/819/044/976/original/ca5215287839049e.jpg
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/368/818/438/613/873/original/0934a610fba4078f.jpg

2026-03-30 08:30:47 UTC

Several years ago, a street medic described a system like this and wanted to know if it could be built.
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/08/the-tak-ecosystem-military-coordination-goes-open-source/
Back then there was just no way to make it happen. Hardware was too expensive. We couldn't really ever get it cheap enough, per medic, to deploy. Best I could put together was a bunch of burner phones.
But now it's starting to really make sense. LoRa is cheap, and possibly cheaper in bulk. And it wouldn't be necessary to build everything since ATAK-CIV exists and has several open source implementations. It can even tie in to drones (which are illegal to bring to protests in at least a few states).
This has a lot of potential applications for street medic coordination, protest marshal coordination, and for airsoft teams...

2026-03-29 13:07:27 UTC

Writing practice that turned into an action scene.
CW: Fictional representation of war and illegal activity
https://hexmhell.writeas.com/numbers

2026-02-21 21:10:33 UTC

After the whole Adam Something "dating advice for leftist men" thing, I realized I should probably write something about that. I didn't, but I realized I should. Here I am sort of getting around to it.
I had a friend call me an "elder" at one point. I was like 35 at that time, but like... a lot of old leftists are just dead or in prison, so we take what we can get I guess. Being also an elder in the sense that I'm an elder millennial, who is also a parent and married for almost 10 years and all that, I guess I'm technically qualified.
So here it is, dating advice for (straight cis) leftist men:
1. Don't.
That's it, actually. That's the whole thing. Let me explain a bit.
First of all, this is dating advice for neuroatypical folks. We're way overrepresented in both extremes because this system wasn't built for us. And that's who is *the most* confused by all the relationship stuff, and most likely to try to apply all this masculinity/manosphere bullshit. I'm also talking a bit from experience here, as a neruo-spicy trying to "figure out" how to date within a paradigm entirely built around neurotypicals and their relationships. It's garbage. Throw it out. There's nothing worth saving.
His video had some line comparing not having sex to your house being on fire. I'm not gonna bother to quote it because I'm busy with actual life. But like, that's exactly what I'm talking about. I recognize that and it's horribly destructive. Men who buy in to patriarchy actually believe this, because those men value themselves based on (hetro) sex. Yeah, if you think you're worthless because you aren't "getting laid" then yeah, you're gonna feel like that's an emergency.
"Dating" as a paradigm turns humans into roles. It dehumanizes us all, and thus makes human connection much harder. It is a game that, like thermonuclear war, can only be won by not playing.
When you abandon "dating" and just act like a human, everything starts to be easier. There's no such thing as being "friend zoned" because you're just friends. Sometimes friendships become other things, sometimes they don't. It doesn't actually matter, because if you're actually there for friendship then you don't *need* anything else.
My grandma, at 98 I think, gave me some advice. My grandparents always got along well, and were married for enough decades that I listened really closely. She told me I should just do things I loved to do and everything else would work itself out.
And it kind of did.
I understand the fear, the idea that you'll die alone. I get that. I get the loneliness. It all hits a lot harder when you have ADHD emotions and past trauma. I get that. But that fear is self-manifesting. When you build your confidence, when you don't *need* to be "in a relationship," you have more room to actually build relationships. For me, dating was dehumanizing. When I abandoned that, I was able to actually be a good partner, and I was able to find my partner.
I would advise against marriage as well, but we did get married for legal reasons. It can still be hard to maintain that, to see each other as people rather than roles. That becomes extra hard as parents. But the times that we cut through that are the times we're closest. Those are the times when it becomes easier to remember that we're both humans and all human relationships need tending.
Roles don't need to be tended because they are classifications. Classifications are static. But relationships between humans are not. Humans are messy and chaotic. Humans have all kinds of complex needs and desires.
So yeah, don't date. Just be a human and see what happens. Maybe google "relationship anarchy" and see where it takes you.
If you have ADHD, it can be especially useful to understand that relationships with neurotypical folks can be especially difficult. Assume you're incompatible with 90% of the population as your baseline, and you'll start to understand why the standard "dating" thing has made you feel so alienated and miserable.
Neurotypical folks generally have no idea that atypicality exists, much less how it impacts relationships. Having to conform to a neurotypical relationship just adds additional mental strain unless you find someone (really special) who can do at least some of the work.
The ADHD thing was especially important for me. There were so many things I was told to do in specific ways by neurotypicals that never worked for me. Their advice always made me feel like a failure. When I was finally diagnosed, I realized they were just giving advice for the wrong type of brain. It was advice I could never use. Basically all dating advice I ever got fell into this same category.
That's my braindump. Maybe I'll develop it more in the future, but I'm busy so maybe not. I hope it helps someone who is struggling like I was.

2026-02-12 21:45:55 UTC

Roman elites drank from leaded cups because it made water sweeter. Radiation was thought at one time to have healing properties, so people would add uranium to their drinking water. Glowing dishes are still a collectors item. After the discovery of x-rays, shoe stores started installing them and using them on kids feet to size shoes. Lead was added to gasoline to improve engine performance, and paint to make it whiter. We all know about asbestos and DDT.
We look back at all of this and think, "how could people have been so incompetent back then?" Some of these things caused irreparable harm in their generation, some continue to cause harm today almost 100 years later.
If you wonder that, look at the whole #LLM thing and you have your answer.

2026-02-05 10:31:21 UTC

I mentioned earlier that I was writing something on #LLMs. Here it is...
https://write.as/hexmhell/what-an-llm-actually-is
Edit: realized I probably should have tagged it.
#LLM

2026-02-04 16:43:09 UTC

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@nprofile…35vy oh hell yeah!!!

2026-01-20 08:48:19 UTC

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There are a lot of takeaways from this:
1. Organizing locally gives you a massive advantage because you will always know your local area better than ICE ever can.
2. Be agile. You can always change tactics faster than a centralized organization.
3. Organize now. The sooner you build your networks, the sooner you can learn.
4. Identify ICE facilities and organize monitoring them directly.
But I think the most interesting one that's not explicitly in there, one that's hinted at the last one, is to go on the offensive. ICE is already afraid. If we all take the anger we have at the murder of #ReneGood, find the local ICE facility that they'll stage from, and bring that anger to #OccupyICE we might be able to just shut the whole thing down preemptively. Completely stop all ICE operations across the US. If they want to fight, they can fight *with everyone, all at once.*
Shut down their ability to operate at all. They have a logistics pipeline. They need cars, they need oil in those cars, they need to be able to move those cars to target areas. They also need money to pay those agents. All of those can be disrupted.
The regime needs your money and labor to maintain the illusion of legitimacy. They chose a bad time because you can hit both of those at once *right now* with a combination of #GeneralStrike and #TaxStrike, and then #BoycottEverything.
The regime is weaker than it's ever been. It's flailing. Their own base is demanding the release of the #EpstienFiles. Their last gasp attempt to prevent the radical change that's coming is just to ethnically cleanse the US back to the 50's (which is what they always meant by "Make America Great Again"). Trump will do anything to stay in power, even if it means killing everyone on Earth in the process. But Americans can end it now by going on the offensive.
Now is the time.
#USPol

2026-01-20 08:28:49 UTC

Everyone who hasn't already read the Twin Cities rapid response analysis should now:
https://crimethinc.com/2026/01/15/rapid-response-networks-in-the-twin-cities-a-guide-to-an-updated-model

2025-12-26 22:25:04 UTC

"The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses."
And in this case the things they are using to kill it have radio transponders that regularly transmit their geolocation, and these can be looked up on sites that also generally track their Intended destination.
Frog suit Luigi jokes aside, I do feel like it would be possible to blockade some of these ships or at least make their stays in some ports uncomfortable. There are some problems with tracking boats to specific owners, but any giant yacht should probably just be resisted on principle.
I hope someone with more organizing time than me thinks about this a bit. It would definitely take international effort, but an international org like XR could actually probably pull something like that off... If they actually wanted to do something.
#nevent1q…jwp3

2025-12-26 07:42:24 UTC

The paradox of Nazism being both the most capitalist thing possible, defining itself as explicitly anticommunist, while masquerading as "socialism" is difficult to resolve until you understand one thing: fascism pivots around antisemitism (and its extension, conspiratorial thinking).
I'm, of course, not talking about the redefinition of "antisemitism" into meaning any criticism of Israel but rather an anti-Jewish conspiracy narrative rooted in Roman Christianity.
This is critical to understand as MAGA fascism pivots between capitalist and pseudo-anticapitalist with Trump in the middle. Hitler did the same thing. Strasserism helped the Nazis gain power by pulling in the Left. In the Nazis case they killed the Stasserists pretty quickly. Now, I think we're seeing an attempt to make the opposite pivot happen in MAGA. But it's all the same thing.
Fascism can infinitely fail to address the needs of the people while dismissing it's own responsibility for creating the problem by maintaining a permanent enemy.
This is why it's important to understand antisemitism and how to fight it. It's especially important now because the apparatus of violence in Israel is itself a tool of global fascism, and we finally have an opportunity to dismantle the whole thing. But we have to be aware of how fascists can pivot around to block this.
I've been reading Safety Through Solidarity, and I think it's especially relevant at this time.
https://www.akpress.org/safety-through-solidarity.html

2025-12-16 19:58:18 UTC

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@nprofile…998y Probably also worth mentioning copy levies as (at least) tangentially related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
I'd be interested in knowing how much global taxes on media just goes directly into the pockets of American IP holders.

2025-12-12 14:31:02 UTC

If you've ever wanted to go out in the woods and have fun with some friends, but you can't figure out how to also make it about organizing, I have good news. It turns out that there are significant overlaps between a big outdoor gathering, houseless camp support, and disaster response.
Tell yourself you're practicing for the revolution, but also maybe practice some fun.
https://pnc.st/s/live-like-the-world-is-dying/9a40dfa9/organizing-outdoor-gathering-infrastructure/transcript

2025-12-08 18:57:57 UTC

Graeber was right.
https://youtu.be/X035QqagO00

2025-11-29 12:03:07 UTC

Fascism has arrived in the US. Here's a video of a (liberal) lawyer just straight up saying the courts won't save you.
The system only speaks two languages now: money and violence. If you want a chance to avoid the second, now is the time to use the first. #MassBlackout is a #Boycott of the American corporations that support the dictatorship. By showing that people have the power to shut down the economy if elites don't listen, we can hit them where it actually hurts.
From now until December 2nd, do as many of these things as you can:
- Stop online or in-store shopping (except for small businesses)
- Stop work
- Stop streaming, cancel subscriptions, no digital purchases
This is one of the few times that boosting stuff on social media and doing nothing else actually *can* make a difference. Boost posts tagged with #WeAintBuyingIt, #MassBlackout, and #BlackOutTheSystem. Make sure everyone you know knows about it. Hold each other accountable to keep from spending. You may already not be spending because.... well,.. #Trump has already made everything too expensive. The thing is that elites can't actually tell the difference. Spreading word, making the protest seem as big and impactful as possible is all that's really needed to fracture elites and turn them against each other. Boost, write your own post, make these tags trend on every platform you can, then do nothing.
Don't buy things, don't work. Just stop. Refuse to participate in capitalism. This is the ultimate "fuck you, make me" because they absolutely can't make you. This is the ultimate reminder of where power actually comes from.
If you're outside the US, (continue to) boycott American products (if the tariffs haven't already taken care of that) until the regime falls. Cancel all American streaming services, and any other American tech you can. If you're stuck on American tech, spend some time to look for local alternatives.
It turns out the world is more interconnected than capitalists would like you to believe, and we all actually have the power to change things. It's time to prove it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn-rkKIMNAs
#USPol

2025-11-21 10:25:31 UTC

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It's also interesting that we're only tangentially making the connection between shit social media and fascism. What we are not saying is that control of social space *is* a form of governance. Humans have the right to free social spaces, both physical and digital.
When we think about social media as a system of control, as a government, we see that capitalist social media results in incredibly abusive dictatorships. These dictatorships exist solely to exploit their citizens, extracting both labor and attention, for the gain of a few. They manipulate their citizens to keep them locked in. It's not a coincidence that these systems algorithmically promote fascist ideology. They are themselves a type of fascist government that pushes fascism into the physical space.

2025-11-21 10:08:16 UTC

It's Interesting today that the popularization of @nprofile…998y's concept of "enshittification" is leading us to really think hard about how various methods of vendor lock-in enable corporations to abuse users. We see how first there's lock-in then quickly abuse follows, and recognize that the only way out of this trap is to build systems where users can leave at will.
But it's interesting that in this time of rising fascism no one is making the connection to fascism, as both increased lock in and enshittification of government. And no one is making the connection between the need to make systems optional to avoid enshittification, and libertarian socialist arguments against the systemic lock-in (and following abuse) of capitalism and the state.

2025-11-18 22:18:27 UTC

Hey, reminder about #BlackOutTheSystem and #MassBlackout. (https://www.blackoutthesystem.com/ and https://www.themassblackout.com/)
If you're ready for #Trump to go, there's a way to make that happen. Mass economic action sends the absolutely clearest message there is in the one language American power speaks. From November 25th through December 1st, they're calling for a mass coordinated economic action.
You don't have to feel helpless anymore. There are things you can do that actually hurt the system and can force it to comply.
Here's some info from the announcement page:
The Mass Blackout is a nationwide economic action, coordinated across aligned organizations, calling Americans to:
- Stop online or in-store shopping (except for small businesses)
- Stop work
- Stop streaming, cancel subscriptions, no digital purchases
- Remove the regime
If you must spend: support small, local businesses only. Pay in cash.
#USPol #FiftyFiftyOne #50501movment #NoKings

2025-11-11 14:36:21 UTC

Now that I'm almost 40 pages in, I've started to accept that I am, in fact, in the process of writing a book and not a zine.

2025-11-06 12:34:05 UTC

I had 12 weeks of parental leave for each of my children. (Six of those were paid by my company, and 6 by Washington State. In the US, this might come across as bragging but functional countries will be shocked at how little it is.) My partner fed them, because we had the privilege of being able to breast feed, so I took care of diapers, tummy time, and what other things I could.
I learned about elimination communication (EC). We used cloth diapers, for ecological reasons but also because they can help with potty training later. With EC, it was relatively easy. I actually only had to change dirty diapers a few times. I was available, so I could pay attention to our babies. I could learn their body language. Both of them rarely cried because we knew what they needed before they had to cry about it.
When I was forced back to work, the EC thing fell off. We continued to use cloth diapers for a while with our oldest, but it became too hard with our youngest. We had to switch to disposable diapers because of the overhead.
There have been so many wasteful things we've done because we don't have space to do the right thing. Having kids is both isolating and overwhelming. To maintain sanity, you just have to take short cuts when you don't have time or help.
Before kids, we used to really enjoy cooking together. We would start from basic ingredients and work our way up. We made pad thai, squishing tamarind paste from pods by hand. Even after having kids, my oldest and I would collect acorns from the tree down the street and crack them together. The other day we all cracked acorns we had collected for the first time since moving over here (and I made some Dotori-muk. We've also started making bread together again.
Kids really love making and processing food. There's a sensory element to it, which, if you don't have kids, is actually a really big thing kids need. But there's also a social element to making food together. They just behave better when we do things like that. It's almost like there's some kind of evolutionary incentive for kids to *want* to help. Go figure.
I've really been wanting to make seitan as we try to reduce how much meat we eat in our house. Even that meat consumption is partially about convenience. It's relatively cheap and easy to throw a bag of chicken wings in air fryer, or some ground beef in with pearl couscous in the instant pot, and just have low effort food home made food. My partner is vegan. I used to eat mostly vegan at home and only eat meat on occasion, usually eating out. But it just takes more mental energy to cook without meat. It's an easy protein, and our kids are picky.
These threads, and a few others, all connect back to a single thing. When we can slow down, we can be more careful and thoughtful. We can be mindful. We can make decisions that are better for the environment, that account for climate change. When we are under pressure, when we are tired and overworked, it's just harder or impossible to be careful and mindful... and that's exactly the point.
At a time when the survival of our species depends on our ability to slow down and be mindful, we are more stressed and overwhelmed than ever. Because, if we had a chance to slow down and think, if we could make good choices, we would make choices that would destroy the industries at the core of the global order. To slow down, as we did at the beginning of COVID, is catastrophic for "the economy." Of course it is.
When an industry runs out of room to expand by driving efficiency, it must increase demand. If demand is already fulfilled, it must create waste. The more pressure there is on the population, the worse decisions people make, the more they waste. Waste is the point. We are in an existential conflict. If we do not destroy this system, if we cannot simply slow down and think, we will be destroyed by it.
I think about the microplastics from those diapers, the methane from them rotting (not captured in the municipal biogas digester, but released directly into the environment), the little plastic containers of everything, all the opportunity costs of the carelessness inflicted on us to survive, and I wonder, "is any of this really worth my time in the office? Did I really produce so much more value doing my work than when destroyed in order to allow me to work?" Of course not, because the invisible hand, in it's infinite wisdom, has shuffled away that cost. The cost of our family thrashing is borne by society, we are a burden on everyone, while the value of my labor is internalized to the company.
How much of your "carbon footprint" should belong to your employer? There can be no capitalist solution to the climate crisis because capitalism is the crisis.
#ClimateCrisis

2025-11-05 19:28:20 UTC

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@nprofile…64ek heh, you might like this https://hexmhell.writeas.com/the-sword-clb9

2025-11-05 19:26:40 UTC

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@nprofile…64ek @nprofile…s44c there was a bit of time with the Provo movement in the Netherlands where there was kind of a pincer attack. I think that we (anarchists) tend to underestimate the power of politics as theatre. If you can run political theatre on one side and have folks on the streets on the other, you can actually push things a bit forward. The Netherlands has amazing bike infrastructure, among a bunch of other things, because of this type of push.
But you still end up running into the problem you're describing later. Eventually people think "it worked." Then neoliberals sell off your social housing, privatize the postal service, and pave the way for fascists...then collaborate with them.

2025-11-05 11:48:38 UTC

Some nuanced thoughts about electoralism...
https://hexmhell.writeas.com/the-sword-clb9
#Writing #Fiction #ShortStories #USPol #FlashFiction

2025-11-01 21:10:03 UTC

I'm at an interesting intersection between poor as fuck (or adjacent, mostly anarchist) folks and generally well off (mostly liberal-ish) tech folks, so every once and a while I can help with some info that bridges that gap. Right now is kind of a critical time for that.
For anyone not extremely affected by the SNAP thing, here's a reasonable video:
https://youtu.be/HwLaKBHIT7w
#USPol

2025-10-30 14:56:57 UTC

I had a dream last night that folks started using drones to track ICE, which then forced them to roll out jammers before raids, which then allowed people to use radio triangulation to find out where ICE was going to raid... which all makes me think that I may need to stop watching Civ Div videos before bed.

2025-10-30 10:05:59 UTC

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties rarely get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol

2025-10-26 07:33:09 UTC

Reagan's "Welfare Queen" rhetoric was a dog whistle. The whole "southern strategy" was full of dog whistles. Every time Republicans talked about gay marriage as a "states rights" issue, those were dog whistles. Naming a government agency "the Department of Homeland Security" was a dog whistle. Trump's speeches leading up to his first term were full of dog whistles.
Nazis have total control of all branches of government. They've cut off funding to all but the most oppressive elements of the government. There are concentration camps, both in client states (CECOT, among others) and in the US (Alligator Auschwitz, among others). They're actively carrying out ethnic cleansing.
When DHS puts out some Nazi shit, it's not a dog whistle. It's a vuvuzela. They're not trying to signal their intent without any of the "normies" noticing. They actively doing what they wanted to do. It's not a signal because there's nothing to signal. It's a celebration.
#USPol

2025-10-20 08:05:15 UTC

Some leftists have criticized #NoKingsDay2 as useless. Though it was the largest protest in US history, it didn't change anything. I would go further to say that protests like these generally won't change anything. Dictators aren't forced to step down by 2% of the population coming out for one day. If they're forced to step down by protests, those protests are sustained. They are every single day. They are accompanied by general strikes.
We've been watching that happen all over the world. Portland in 2020 gave us a taste of that in the US. The George Floyd Rebellion was the type of resistance that actually brings down dictators like Trump. Occasional protests, no matter how large, can simply be ignored. That is precisely the reason the US developed a militarized police force in the first place. You need more, more than the largest protests in US history, more than Occupy, more than the resistance of the 60's and 70's, more than, and different from, anything we've seen in our lives.
And yet... Each protest has grown, and grown bolder. Some have grown more persistent. If you think of protest as the path to achieve change, you will lose. It is not. But it is a path to escalate. Some people, some otherwise comfortable white folks, came out for their first time. Some people got pepper sprayed for the first time. Some people questioned authority, stood up for the first time, and have had an experience that will radicalize them for the rest of their lives.
Protest is not useful in and of itself. It is training. It's making connections. Authoritarian regimes rely on the illusion of compliance, so visual resistance does actually undermine their power.
Liberals like to teach that non-violence is all about staying peaceful no matter what, that there's some way that morality simply overwhelms an enemy. I remember reading Langston Hughes' A Dream Deferred in high school. I said it was a threat. My teacher said, "you're wrong, he was a pacifist." Pacifism is a threat. If you can spit at me, beat me, shoot me, and I will not move, if I have the strength to absorb violence without flinching, without even rising to violence, what will happen when you push me too far?
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
For peaceful resistance to work, there must be ambiguity. It must not be clear if or when the resistance will stop being peaceful. Peaceful resistance with no possibility of escalation is just cowardice.
My critique then is not so harsh as some other anarchists. If you think that protest alone will work, you're probably going to lose. If you are prepared to escalate, if you are prepared to absorb violence without flinching, then it could be possible for protest alone to topple the dictator. The cracks are already beginning to show.
And then what?
The problems that lead to the George Floyd uprising were never resolved. The problems that lead to Occupy where never resolve. The DAPL was built, protesters were maimed, it leaked multiple times (exactly as predicted). Segregation never went away, it only changed forms. The fact that immigrants have different courts and different rights means that anyone can be arbitrarily kidnaped and renditioned to an arbitrary country. We never did anything about the torture black site. FFS, people can still be stripped of their voting rights and slavery is still legal in the US. The people who control both parties in the US are killing our children and grand children with oil wars and climate change.
Toppling the dictator does nothing to resolve all of the problems that existed before him.
No, #NoKingsDay was absolutely not useless. #NoKings and related protests are extremely useful but they aren't sufficient. But, I think we still need to challenge the movement on two points:
How do you escalate after you're ignored or brutalized?
What do you demand after you win?

2025-10-11 18:28:48 UTC

Here's your regular reminder:
There is no debate over if cars will or will not be part of the future. They will not. They are a luxury we can no longer afford. The question is only if we will choose to rid our future of cars, or allow cars to rid us of our future.
#FuckCars

2025-10-07 10:23:16 UTC

Because this has shown up trending every couple of days for the last week or so, these are not clowns from #Portland. These are clowns from Germany in 2007. #PDX has it's own creative resistence. Let's celebrate the real things they're doing right now.
If you see this picture with the wrong info, please help correct it and don't boost it. It's a great picture. I understand wanting it to be what's happening right now.
I'm just pulling all this info from the other folks who've been debunking it. Thanks to everyone who works hard to keep us all honest.
Receipts:
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/police-injured-in-germany-as-radicals-disrupt-2557545.php
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/332/371/396/465/381/original/11488a236ee0b3c2.jpg

2025-10-07 02:34:55 UTC

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@nprofile…03hd Joseph Campbell has done so much damage to our concepts of what can and can't be an important story. This essay, specifically, I think helped me unwind that a bit also: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carrier_Bag_Theory_of_Fiction
But reading Always Coming Home also really helped me in thinking through what a story could even be.

2025-10-07 02:28:22 UTC

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@nprofile…03hd this is kind of the thing I realized about Joseph Campbell, that the "monomyth" is exactly the problem. It's the type of story that elevates and justifies the oppressor... And the type of story that comes from oppressive cultures. It's not just that Campbell's analysis was patriarchal and eurocentric, but that the monomyth itself is the memetic package of white supremacist patriarchy.
The conquest of Europe by the Romans, and the subsequent genocides across Europe, basically annihilated other stories in the collective imagination of the people who became white. Those that took on the memetic disorder they inherited from the Romans then turned around to inflict it on others.
Fortunately, Ursala K Le Guin was explicitly opposed to Campbell and the "monomyth." Her work, and Octavia Butler's, are some of the stories I go to in unwinding these myths for myself.
But I also think there's more. This idea has been at the center of a lot of my writing projects also. A few of the early stories I published on my blog were focused on playing in the myth space:
https://write.as/hexmhell/on-the-economics-of-slaying-dragons

2025-06-15 14:49:51 UTC

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@nprofile…ncdu they either aren't afraid of the CO, or the CO isn't gonna give them shit.

2025-06-15 14:19:43 UTC

Y'all were wondering which way the army would break. This is as clear an answer as you're going to get.
During drills they were perfectly in time. This isn't a mistake. It's a message.
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/687/802/409/349/310/original/597d90e3aa342eb0.mp4

2025-06-15 13:16:16 UTC

I wouldn't want him to get his "biggest crowd ever" any other way...
#meme #USPol #Trump
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/687/562/334/685/992/original/efb28be3c8470800.jpg

2025-06-14 17:35:43 UTC

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@nprofile…6058 ffs, there's literally a whole Wikipedia page for gangs that have been *found* in the LA Sheriff's Departement.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs
Edit: people found these gangs, *because they were looking*. These gangs are *everywhere.*

2025-06-14 17:34:11 UTC

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@nprofile…6058 also cops just murder people a lot, so it's not like a legit cop is actually safe or OK.
People keep talking about how folks can dress as cops, and no one is saying what the FBI said in 2020: police departments are full of Nazis.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/27/white-supremacists-militias-infiltrate-us-police-report

2025-06-12 10:13:55 UTC

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I'm not saying any new shit:
"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail, MLK

2025-06-12 07:31:28 UTC

The liberal obsession with optics serves the right and persuades no one. There is literally an active ethnic cleansing happening in the US right now, and the only thing that matters is making that as hard as possible to carry out.
Anarchists destroying intelligence assets saves lives. Every escooter thrown at a cop car is one less escort for a goon too afraid to kidnap random brown people without being flanked by a branch full of bad apples. Spray paint is not violence. Vandalism is not violence. Community self defense in all forms is legitimate.
Make no mistake, these raids are about changing demographics. Demographic trends have been shifting blue for a long time, and the right has, for a long time, been blaming "white replacement." Conspiracy theory aside, Democrats have also been relying on the growth of black and brown voters as a block. The nuances of whiteness as an identity are lost on the current administration and their supporters. They see that "white people will be a minority by 2050" and equate that with the "end of Western Civilization."
The only way to "save Western Civilization" is to change those demographics. Forced birth and forced removal are two sides of the same white nationalist objective. Of course they can't have due process, because they need to be able to kidnap anyone who they see as a threat to their demographic future.
They don't care about optics. The plan is to murder away any threat and flood everyone else with propaganda. There is no mythical middle. There's no one unconvinced. They know this, but they win when democrats buy that myth and save the police the work of policing the protests.
If your protest is 90% "peaceful," they'll take pictures of the 10% that isn't. If it's 99% peaceful, they'll shoot rubber bullets and teargas until someone throws a brick and take 100 pictures from a dozen angles. If its 100% "peaceful" and no one can be provoked, they'll generate pictures with AI or photoshop like they did during the George Floyd uprising and the pictures from the CHOP/CHAZ. Do you have literally no memory?
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/13/media/seattle-fox-news-autonomous-zone-protest
You can't win on optics... And you don't have to. People trapped in Fox news will not be swayed by anything. They aren't necessary. There are more than enough people to stop this, if you stop policing each other and feeding people to the police in order to "keep it peaceful." A tiny amount of direct action is more than enough to completely collapse the ethnic cleansing machine.
There is not, and has never been, an unconvinced group. This is a myth the right uses to control you.
I'm not saying, "go loot 7/11." There are plenty of things that shouldn't be on the table. But I am saying that if someone is trying to flip an ICE van or police escort and y'all sit down so the cops can grab that person, you are murdering as many people as ICE can kidnap if those assets aren't destroyed. If you go tell the cops about someone burning a Waymo, you are helping ICE intelligence kidnap and rendition people to foreign death camps.
And you are doing it for nothing. None of your collaboration with the police will stop them. Look at Newsom. No matter how much you collaborate, you will always be the enemy. Just be the enemy and don't be afraid of it. Do what needs to be done to save lives, to save families, to save your neighbors. That's literally all that matters.
Genocide must be stopped by any means necessary and all means available. Anything less than that is collaboration with the perpetrators.
#USPol #FiftyFiftyOne #50501movenent #resistance #NoKingsDay #NoKingsDayOfAction

2025-05-22 13:23:15 UTC

Another great #meme someone sent me...
#Luigi
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/551/679/417/853/848/original/9eea78d99a96971d.jpg

2025-05-22 04:05:34 UTC

Revolution doesn't start with dedicated heroes taking radical actions. It doesn't start with a well funded vanguard. All revolutions start essentially the same way: with the belief that a better world is possible and achievable.
Revolutions start with hope. Everything else grows from that point.

2025-05-17 07:13:02 UTC

Reminder: there's already a killer AI enslaving humans and destroying the planet, and it's called "capitalism."

2025-04-19 08:49:39 UTC

I urge everyone to re-read and contemplate Willem Van Spronsen’s Final Statement with the context of Kilmar Abrego Garcia rendition to a concentration camp where people are being starved to death, the kidnaping and disappearance of anti-genocide activists, the detention of US born citizens, and the threat to expand El Salvador's concentration camp program to allow for the rendition and detention of thousands of American citizens.
Read it now, before anyone who dares to talk about it gets disappeared to a Central American death camp.
https://itsgoingdown.org/on-williem-van-spronsen/
#USPol

2025-04-08 20:28:14 UTC

Trump doesn't have a sense of humor. He doesn't joke. He knows what he says is absolutely illegal.
He's not good with money. He's not good at negotiating. He's not a business man. He has no skills that are valuable to any other person. But he is extremely good at getting away with fraud.
One of the skills required to get away with lots of fraud is knowing that you can trust your accomplices. How do you do that?
You can't just ask someone, "hey, wanna do some crimes with me?" They could be against those crimes. They could get your arrested. Even talking about some crimes is a crime itself. You also can't just ask someone straight out, "how do you feel about, say, tax fraud? You know, hypothetically... for a friend."
You have to understand where they're at. You have to explore their boundaries and beliefs in a way that's actually plausibly deniable.
Pretending to joke is invaluable to people like Trump. He follows mob rules when getting things done. Joke, test the waters, then imply directions but never explicitly give them. It should always be possible to pull back and claim you didn't say a thing or mean it "in that way." Ambiguity and plausible deniability are critical. This criminal skill translates perfectly to politics.
The far right has used this tactic for years to pry open the Overton Window. Legacy media has been complicit in the right wing tactic by perennially platforming fascists.
Trump starts by making a "joke." He'll keep making the "joke" until enough people around him think he can get away with it, then it stops being a joke and starts being a policy. Once you've become normalized to the "joke," the Overton window has opened enough to talk about the reality.
When he "jokes" about deporting American citizens, he means he's planning to use ICE to kidnap protesters like he did in Portland at the end of his last term. But he will send them to a death camp in El Salvador instead of just intimidating them. He is telegraphing his next move. Get ready for it.
#USPol
Edit:
ref https://social.treehouse.systems/@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes/114302728431458606
Edit:
Nor is this hypothetical or "at some point in the distant future." High profile targets, like Sam Beard (organizer for Luigi's defense fund among other things), are being chosen now:
https://bsky.app/profile/partygirls.bsky.social/post/3lmdlnr2gac2q
#FreeLuigi

2025-04-06 10:18:33 UTC

"Move fast and break things" is "haste makes waste" restated as an objective.

2025-03-30 07:33:45 UTC

Just a worthwhile reminder for #TeslaTakedown folks: #Tesla was never a real car company under #Musk. It was always an unprofitable grift propped up by massive government subsidies. The bubble was always going to pop at some point. It's always been vulnerable. There will never be robot taxis, or robots, or any of the other bullshit he's always promised to pump up the hype. That was always a lie.
The work you're doing is great and important, and you will win. Elon will find more ways to dump money into Tesla to prop up the stock, but, in the end, it will collapse. Tesla should have died a long time ago. You are attacking the only thing Tesla has: image. Keep going, you will win.

2025-03-25 06:03:26 UTC

Some years back a friend of mine related a conversation about the game Prison Architect. Basically someone had figured out a way to maximize profits by creating an area with bad wiring so that prisoners would end up being elected. My friend pointed out, "uh, dude, you just built a death camp."
It's actually surprisingly realistic that the most profitable prison would be a death camp. In fact, Monowitz was a concentration camp (an extension of Auschwitz) run by the conglomerate IG Farben. It was one of the most brutal Nazi camps that regularly worked people to death. It was also very profitable.
After the end of the civil war, US slavery transitioned from chattel to prison slavery. The convict leasing system was similar to the arrangement between IG Farben and the Nazi government in that prisoners were leased for labor with no concern for safety. American prisoners were used for dangerous labor like coal mining. It's no coincidence that these slaves were explicitly used to break strikes by free miners.
It won't surprise anyone that almost all of these slave prisoners were black, but not *all.* That was part of why it became less popular. Convict leasing *mostly* stopped after a white guy was whipped to death while being leased.
But it never really went away and the private prison industry, who funded Trump and Republicans are heavily invested in, has been bringing back prison slavery bit by bit.
It would be really profitable if they could have a really large supply of labor that they could make money off of and then dispose of, before they had to spend money on things like basic healthcare. It turns out that keeping people alive really eats into those profits, you can make way more money if you just work people to death.
Turns out, that the most profitable prison is a death camp. Monowitz wasn't run by Nazis trying to kill as many "undesirables" as possible. It was run by business people trying to maximize profit. It doesn't take an evil or hateful ideology to drive people to commit atrocities. It just takes perverse incentives.
Take some time to think about the fact that there is a tremendous financial incentive to build death camps in the US, that the people who would regulate them are all invested in the industry, and then take another look at what's happening in the US right now. What's going to happen next?
Take some time to process this and think about this question. It's worth thinking through carefully.
#USPol

2025-03-11 14:36:29 UTC

Under GDPR, anyone in the EU has the right to request surveillance footage of themselves. #Tesla takes records videos but seems to kind of throw their customers under the bus in terms of compliance with GDPR.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/tesla-s-sentry-mode-is-a-privacy-8488081/
So how do we make this as big a problem as possible for Tesla and EU Tesla owners?

2025-02-23 09:59:51 UTC

I think it's worth reminding everyone that there was probably never a time in US history when fascism could have been prevented. The US is founded on slavery, genocide, patriarchy, and oligarchy. Oligarchy and patriarchy are literally written into the constitution.
The electoral college is explicitly anti-democratic. The Senate was designed to maintain slavery. The two party system is explicitly built to *prevent* democracy. The drug war was *specifically* created to stop the civil rights movement. The entire country is a blatantly illegal occupation of land where other people already lived, which violates multiple treaties signed with those people. They tried to coup FDR. Even Kennedy was killed by right wing stochastic terrorism. The opportunity to fork is older than any of us.
There was *maybe* a chance to fix this during Reconstruction, and we all know how that went.
No, Joe couldn't have done what's needed to fix things because that would require dismantling his own party. No, voting for Bernie would not have changed anything. They would have just boomerang Allended him during his first week.
The problem is, and has always been, the existence of the US itself.

2025-02-13 19:18:57 UTC

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I'm excitedly awaiting news of the first US armored vehicle to be downed with a super soaker.

2025-02-13 19:16:13 UTC

I have good news for any countries interested in forcibly expelling US forces in the near future...
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/13/g-s1-48571/trump-administration-order-400-million-worth-of-armored-teslas

2025-02-05 08:12:02 UTC

Hey right libertarians, corporations are just states that are not locked to a geographical region.
Hey tankies, states are just corporations with militaries and police.
Your critiques of both corporations and the state are generally valid, and your support for the other doesn't really make a lot of sense. I hope that clears things up.
Now put down the Rand and the Lenin and read some Bookchin and Öcelan.

2025-02-01 05:47:09 UTC

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@nprofile…sc3v @nprofile…z2fs @nprofile…wjfe @nprofile…qz4x there was an excellent breakdown of the things that lead to successful resistance movements.
TL;DR:
1. Maximize economic impact. Make it financially inviable to keep doing the wrong thing. Boycotts, strikes, protests that stop business, etc, all impose an economic cost. The state only responds to the rich. If you hurt them enough to stop, the state will respond to their demands.
2. Choose specific targets. The examples from the talk included strikes against GM and boycott of Woolworth's. Both of these were precision economic attacks that cascaded across the market, leading to policy changes.
3. Escalate. The threat of escalation is the real reason the capitalist class gives in. If they think they can wait it out, they will. Ending legally enforced segregation in the US took both MLK's peaceful marches (and boycotts and other actions) and the threat of radical escalation (from Malcolm X). People love to talk about Gandhi, but they always omit the violent protests that were also happening at the same time. Peaceful resistance that works *always* includes an implicit threat of violence. "We're going to march peacefully now, but it will only stay peaceful if it works."
On the 3rd point, IMHO the #50501 movement should definitely intersect with #FreeLuigi at least using some symbolism (#LuigiBloc anyone?). Visible resistance is a *really good* start.
Edit: just to reiterate, it is the *threat* of escalation that works *not escalation itself*. The longer a movement can stay non-violent, the longer it can build. The longer it builds, the bigger the threat of sustainable escalation becomes. A movement that rapidly turns to violence also becomes rapidly isolated and easy for the state to wipe out.

2025-01-30 04:52:02 UTC

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@nprofile…xyvy the UN definition of genocide includes separation children from parents and adopting them to families outside of the culture. Genocide is the attempt to destroy a culture or a people. It *often but not always* includes the wholesale killing of members of that culture.
Under the UN definition of genocide, ICE legally committed genocide under Trump the first time.
Edit:
Article 2 section e
"Forcibly transferring children from the group to another group"

2025-01-30 03:51:05 UTC

"How long until they accidentally deport an American"
Oh, I'd say about last Trump administration a whole bunch of times. Here's ONE example:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/michigan-man-who-had-never-been-iraq-was-deported-there-n1040426
ICE is an agency with almost no oversight that has literally committed acts of genocide within the last decade. They *will* deport Americans, they will do it enthusiastically. They don't need to prove anything. There is no constitution within 100 miles of the US border (which is the vast majority of Americans).
Today they're justifying it as immigrants. They will disappear other people. You are not protected if you are white, they'll just deport you to Russia so Putin can send you to fight Ukraine. They don't care what language you speak, they have never cared about that. There is no government oversight to stop them.
As long as ICE feels like they can operate freely, no one is safe.
I don't think Americans have fully grasped this yet.

2025-01-24 08:26:20 UTC

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@nprofile…qc9u I know this is scary, but I think it's important to point out that it won't work. This is a combination of grift and bluff.
There's an exponential dropoff in the effectiveness and accuracy of models as they grow. There's also an increase in attack surface. In terms of signal intelligence, it will be insanely leaky.
So this thing will lie and hallucinate, make it easy for people to tell they are being investigated, and be trivial to evade. It will also burn insane amounts of electricity and money. It will never match expectations, but that's unlikely to stop investment.
The more work they do to avoid evasion, the more vulnerable it will be. They won't be able to make it more accurate because they're going to run in to the fundamental limitations of the technology.
Let me get in to some concrete examples to make it clear what I mean.
Let's say some people are taking, say, on Mastodon, about something. First, the system has to scrape. It's already leaking information about itself just by doing this. We can know how often it runs and may even be able to fingerprint the technology stack. We can use this information to poison the data set.
Ok, let's say they're just getting stuff from phones via company installed backdoors. How do you know how someone is communicating? What platforms are they using? Simply using signal increases the complexity of getting at this data, even on a backdoored phone, a bit. This is more true at scale than for individually targeted attacks, but I'm not going to get in to the details there.
Ok, so let's say this thing is going through every text you sends, every message that goes through a FAANG owned messaging app. You send a link to someone. There are three options for how to handle this link:
1. Ignore the link. The model loses information.
2. Follow the link immediately. The model is vulnerable to a DoS. Basically a bunch of people send links to poisoned data to each other, the AI ingests this and poisons their data set. You also leak data about how often you scrape.
3. Follow the link only on investigation. The model leaks information about who is being investigated and is also vulnerable to a DoS. So, if you want to know if you're being investigated you occasionally send links to resources you control (that's not easily found any other way, like a url with a UUID that's not indexed) to people but ask via external channels not to follow those links. If the link gets hit, your communication channel is compromised. Now you poison the data set anyway.
So URLs let you circumvent it or attack it. But there are a bunch of other ways too. The more a model is focused on English language, the worse it will do on other languages. This is especially true of rare languages, and even more true of niche cultural slang. So even if this thing reads every single text you and everyone else writes, it may have no ability to know that you're planning to "🦆 thr d474 alle ∆." That's just garbage to an AI, but a human can probably figure it out.
But even in English, you can just send your text inside a file. Now they have another choice:
1. Ignore the file and lose data.
2. Parse the file.
Which do you think management is going to tell them to do? So they parse the file. Now they're vulnerable to trivial DoS and almost definitely vulnerable to RCE (remote code execution, or "getting owned the fuck sideways" in simple terms). How are they going to get around compression bombs? Fingerprinting? Sure, but there are infinitely many of these.
That brings us to steganography (stego). Stego is the forgotten cousin of cryptography (crypto). Crypto (in this context) is about keeping a message confidential by making it impossible to read by anyone but the intended recipient, even with the text. Stego is about hiding the existence of the message in the first place. It has largely been ignored because cryptography works pretty well and can be easy to detect.
But this equation changes when you're dealing with mass surveillance like this. Trivial stego that would be easy for a human to crack becomes a huge problem at scale. A simple example is just putting text in image metadata. Ok, so the surveillance folks write a parser for that. Great, now hide data in the low order bits of an image. Write a parser for that. Now just put it in the text, ok so OCR it. Ok, create a doc file that has an XML bomb in it so that it crashes but put the raw text you want to relate inside... There are infinitely many ways to evade, many of them are trivial to detect and parse, but that means you're essentially writing infinite parsers. There are also *much harder* problems to solve, but I'm not even getting in to that.
Yeah, basically, this shit is *way* harder than they think it will be and someone still has to build it. Now they have to decide on hiring for competence or loyalty. Good luck with that shit. Maybe some comrades should go work at Oracle for a bit to make sure that doesn't even happen in the first place. ;)

2025-01-23 08:40:55 UTC

If your "resistance to fascism" centers flashy militance and individual action over care work and community building, then you're replicating the patriarchal patterns that lead to fascism in the first place.
Our work now is the same work it's always been, the same work it always will be. Take care of eachother. Build systems that protect us. Expand the caring and healing system so that we protect as many people as possible as the state withdrawals and succumbs to it's sickness.
Sustainable militancy can only exist when built on a foundation of community. Militant action without community simply reinforces the status quo by acting as a tool to justify further oppression.
Go organize.

2025-01-21 19:47:02 UTC

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There are a few different version of the sabotage manual in PDF linked from this thread too, but in case you want to download an epub, Gutenberg also has it...
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184

2025-01-21 14:40:40 UTC

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I am riffing a bit off this. I actually think both should probably be used together. It can be valuable to push back, and it can be valuable to undermine. Choose your path wisely based on how you read the situation.
https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/113866093397576803
Edit: and if you boosted mine, you should probably boost this too.

2025-01-21 14:37:37 UTC

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People may say, "it's not possible to debug memory issues with Wireshark. That doesn't even make sense. What the fuck is wrong with you?" That doesn't mean you shouldn't try, repeatedly. Sure it's impossible, but don't let reality get in the way of your vision! It's not like leadership ever has!

2025-01-21 14:32:10 UTC

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Also, get randomized. If you have anything else, do that instead. Only work on whatever evil thing if you are explicitly asked to prioritize it above everything else. Then, if you're asked for anything after that point, drop the evil thing and take whatever new request. Add several days of delay for "task switching" when asked to come back.
One reason to feign compliance is so that the task doesn't get assigned to someone who might actually do it.

2025-01-21 14:24:11 UTC

Hey fellow tech folks. We might get asked to do something terrible. I'd like to start a bit of an open discussion about how to deal with such requests.
The first thing I might recommend is enthusiastically agree to do whatever it is then forget about it and do something else. If asked about it in the future, pretend this is the first you've heard about it. Play as dumb as you can for as long as you can.
Now, if you can't get away with delaying by not doing anything anymore then find the absolute most complicated way to do whatever it is. This is actually a great time to use an LLM. Have an LLM write all your code then just run it. Ask the LLM to fix anything that's broken. Take some extra steps to force downgrade or upgrade libraries to incompatible versions. Write all of your own interfaces by hand. Write your own date parsing library. Write all of your own SQL without any abstractions. Add an LLM in the middle some how. Use libraries that haven't been supported for 15 years. Ever want to write code in Python 2.0? Now's your chance! Debug everything with Wireshark, no matter what it is. I bet there's a VB script library to do what you need to do, and if you can just write a C wrapper around that it'll interface perfectly with perl, as soon as you can get that old FoxPro program running in wine. I bet it would be easier without that commit hook that changes every zero to a capital letter O. "I'm getting the craziest error. It works on my system!"
There are a million ways to make things insanely complicated, and most of us have seen people legitimately do these things out of pure incompetence.
Now, if you end up against the wall and think you might get fired package everything up and hand it off to someone else, but make sure you make it clear that you're almost done and it should be super easy to finish. Leave behind some fun puzzles for the next person to figure out.
"How strange...the output changes when I change the whitespace, but not when I change the text. What is that?"
Who's got some other fun suggestions for extremely malicious compliance?

2025-01-20 06:41:32 UTC

If you're looking for the law to save you from Trump, Donald Trump is the law now. Rule of Law has always been a weapon of the strong to control the weak. It's not that he's turned it into a weapon, it's that he's less competent at hiding its true nature as a tool of oppression.
The good news is that you never actually needed the law to begin with. We've always needed community, and that's the real antithesis to fascism: not the law, but eachother.

2025-01-19 09:42:46 UTC

It's an interesting confluence of events we're seeing.
American and Chinese folks circumventing state mediation and talking straight to eachother. Drone warfare in Syria and Ukraine has changed the dynamics of combat in a similar way to how the machine gun eliminated the effectiveness of the most powerful horse cavalry in the world and redefined the way wars were fought. American anarchist volunteers cycling out of Syria and Ukraine and coming home with combat experience, specifically with drone combat. A guy shooting a CEO and the accused shooter being turned in to a folk hero, while media and talking heads burn all the trust they had left trying to portray him as a villan.
All while the most hated and incompetent president in history tries to take power, promising to carry out genocide specifically targeting, among others, people who feed the country and also promising to implement tariffs that will absolutely obliterate the economy.
Remember that authoritarianism takes more energy to maintain than egalitarianism. As the climate crisis continues to accelerate, the energy needs of hierarchy will continue to grow. Meanwhile, we are far past the peak oil.
The fact that the US military is the number one global consumer of fossil fuels is no coincidence. Oil is the fuel of oppression, and it's time is limited. Putin more than anyone else, is the oil dictator. Trump is modeling himself off of Putin, and will need an infinite supply of petroleum and to avoid natural disasters in order to maintain power... He is guaranteed to get the opposite.
Yeah, this is going to be wild.

2025-01-16 15:34:05 UTC

It's kind of hilarious that the backlash against the #TikTok ban had the unintended consequence of Americans using to #rednote and learning mandarin, but also it's even funnier that the influx of English also fucks up Chinese censorship.
I hope that this ends up being an opportunity for Americans to learn how to evade censorship and detection before the US turns the fash to 11. Maybe there will be unintended trouble for both authoritarian governments.
People of the world unite against their shitty governments.