I followed a similar trajectory, leaving the tech sector to pursue politically-motivated jobs. Am I locked-in? Probably, my linkedin is full of agitprop. Do I care? No, the world is on fire, there's no coming back. I get to the end of the month, I'm doing important stuff, fuck careers, there are more important things.

The person I know that got fired is even more gung-ho than me so I can imagine they don't care either.

From what I know, no. It's full of more politically-aligned workplaces, like NGOs and research groups, that crave politically-motivated people with tech skills. I know personally one of the fired workers that went on to do a PhD right after being fired.

That's good, but do it as a worker, rather than as a communist. One is helpful, the other is harmful.

If you're up for it, joining Tech Workers Coalition would be a good starting point.

This is exactly the logic that fucks shit up. Let workers do workers stuff, we don't want no leftist infighting now that there's traction.

I don't know what understanding you have of this topic, but historically and presently, the Free Software movement and the Open Source movement are ideological opposites, with the latter spawning off of the first to accomodate pro-corporate, pro-capitalist positions.

Both of these are also different from the totality of entities proposing "open source licensing", which is a much broader set.

Then nowadays the Free Software Movement lost its momentum and it has been subsumed into the idea of "FOSS", but still, it should be treated as its own, dinstinct entity.

As for the genocide per default part: Its nonsense to believe that if open source didnt exist or was different that it would somehow lead to less genocide.

Open source is just a technical and legal reflection of a world and a time where Imperial venture capital benefited from the free flow of information. I think the author would agree that, if open source didn't exist, something else would have enabled similar or different forms of Imperial oppression, including genocide. Same for the start-up ecosystem, digital capital taking over the financial economy and Western democracies and so on. Open Source enabled that? For sure. But if we want to play "what if", any serious materialist analysis would conclude that Open Source was just a tool for digital capital to express itself and exploit workers. A tool that could have been replaced by something else.

the article doesn't mention the Free Software Movement even once.

Also the article is making a point that you don't need to side for genocide to enable a genocide. That's the whole point.

you clearly have no clue what you're talking about. The federal funding goes to Weizenbaum Institute, that is another very big institution in techno politics and other fields of research. You keep googling shit up.

funneling of grants towards her dubious work at TUB

Bro, don't just google shit about scholars you have no clue about and make up fake accusations. She's not doing research at TU Berlin, she's just a lecturer there. She's one of the most famous scholars in this field and she's associated more strongly with DAIR, which is a thousand times more relevant in this discourse than TU, and DiPLab in Paris.

You clearly just googled her name, checked where she works, and made up some shit.

also shaming anybody for the labor they have to do to survive is the most reactionary patronizing bullshit ever.

We are also the first country that got rid of fascism 😉

I'm talking about a private individual invading the physical and digital spaces of public institutions with the president providing political cover and stopping other parts of the state to intervene. That's a self-coup. Nothing like that happened in Italy and so far the government is operating within legality.

anywhere outside Milan you won't be able to rely on English for anything. Bureaucracy and services are going to be a nightmare without conversational Italian.

No self-coup happened yet, most constitutional freedoms are still respected, there are no political extra-judicial arrests (or at least not that many). Except for some repression of communitarian spaces and public protests, it is not sensibly different from any center/center-right neoliberal government.

user research is a common design and marketing term to mean "identify product consumption and interface preferences"

White people discovering alpha amylase. Asians have been using it for millennia in stuff like amazake but also many alcoholic preparations.

Both questions would deserve a book each to really answer, but I will try.

How are you defining mass parties? Relatively large participatory base, strategy decided democratically, presence on the local territory and ties with communities. Here though I was more framing them as "parties designed for a mass society", where their strategy relies on the possibility to reduce the individual to mass, as in the case of workers parties. A one-size-fits-all organization, where one strategy, one identity and one theory of change is shared by millions of people.

When did they stop working, and why?

There are at least two big elements: the first is the end of mass society. Once we became all individuals, the mechanism of identification in a collective entity became harder. It got even harder over time, when most young people have no examples or memory of anybody around them ever acting collectively.

The second element is informational: mass parties are incredibly slow. The analysis-synthesis-action-assessment most ML parties are based on is predicated on the assumption that the social and political phenomena you're working with don't change too fast and between the analysis phase and the action phase, the underlying phenomenon is relatively stable. If the analysis is too slow or the phenomenon (i.e. specific industries, specific political landscapes, etc etc) change too fast, your analysis is always late. Correct, but useless. This renders anybody involved in such ecosystems (not just mass parties), very aware of the motivations of their own failure, but completely incapable of escaping them.

What does that mean? The PCF is pretty much a dying party with basically no relevance.

Have you ever spoken with an urban young mainlander? They are the most individualistic people on Earth. Beats any gun-bearing Texan everyday.

History does matter. In the same way mass parties wouldn't have worked in 15th century Europe, they won't work now. Learning history is useful to understand how entire system of thought and action survived way past their relevance, doomed and incapable of understanding their own demise.

Mass society in the West doesn't exist anymore. You're unfit to achieve anything you want to achieve and you lack the tools to elaborate to yourself why you keep losing. The world moved on and so should your politics.