Thread | Brutkey

I was once gifted a 9/11 memorial CIA challenge coin for participating in a roundtable discussion with a bunch of Pentagon guys about what a "makerspace" is. This was at my office, at the behest of my employer. Guy said the 9/11 coins were the only ones left in the giftshop. That's the day I stopped trying to convince myself that what we were doing was good.

Nick Poole
@North@chaos.social

Maybe it's more personal for people who were there at the inception, but I was late to the game and while I absolutely drank the kool-aid for a while, I did eventually become disillusioned with the whole thing before my entire self-conception was based on it. Even then, it has been an ongoing struggle to separate the things that are good and human (transparency, sharing, cooperation, creativity) from the things that are extractive and exploitative about "our hobby"

Nick Poole
@North@chaos.social

All this is to say: You don't get to get rich off Arduino and then act shocked and disgusted when it's subsumed by capital interests. Not within the context of the economy that produced it.

Can you be disappointed? Of course. Sad? Angry? Of course, you should be. But by that measure, you should be sad and angry about everything

Fuck Qualcomm, yes. But furthermore, fuck the whole thing top to bottom.

Nick Poole
@North@chaos.social

Foster an understanding of the systems that coopted your passion. Fight these systems where and when you can. Help each other. Each one teach one.

In the meantime: Buy a Chinese clone, pirate an IDE, make something out of the trash that we're drowning in. Have fun.

rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua
@GustavinoBevilacqua@mastodon.cisti.org

@North@chaos.social

Your story remembers me the self-defined "comrades" who in 1978 bought a Renault 4 just because it was used by Red Brigades to hide the corpse of Aldo Moro¹

As if Renault didn't exploit workers just like every other car brand!

~~

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_and_murder_of_Aldo_Moro#Discovery_of_the_body