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In 2016, resistance meant defiance. This time it means sabotage.

That’s the meta-lesson that emerges from me reading this piece from @jaykuo and The Big Picture. The essay is mostly about strategy for D politicians, but that that larger lesson there? That’s for all of us.

Not just defiance. Sabotage.

thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p

1/

The Big Picture · What A Democratic Resistance Would Look Like Under TrumpBy The Big Picture
Paul Cantrell

What does that mean in practice? Well, here’s a relatively gentle practical example:

Suppose you’re on a software team that gets a contract doing work that will benefit the fascists.

Defiance means you refuse the project, maybe quit your job.

Sabotage means you finally embrace that management mandate to use more AI. Really embrace it. Be incredibly productive. Generate lots of code. LOTS of code. Utterly obscene quantities of code.

2/

My fellow software folks, we all know how make a project drag on for •years• giving off all the signs of making progress while never, ever reaching the point of being releasable before the whole thing is finally scrapped.

At last, this is an ability we can use for good.

I jest, but actually I don’t jest. Sand in the gears, people. Burn the fash’s resources. Run out the clock.

Not just defiance. Sabotage.

/end

@inthehands that's an old labour movement tactic by the way, we call it "operação tartaruga" in Brazil iirc, for when you can't go on strike for some reason

@edcrypt @inthehands
I think in US unions, back in the day at least, work to rule was the term of art.

@vruz
why_not_both.gif

(And with all seriousness, both matter! In some situations, highly visible sabotage will be immediately countered and stopped, whereas low-grade, almost-invisible sabotage sustained over time will have a much larger net impact. Both tools will matter.)

@inthehands Malicious compliance is a term I’ve heard.

@inthehands yes; and this will be better with union organisation behind it.

@marnanel
Yes. Any and every kind of organizing and community-building can help, and unions are the vanguard, the prototype, and when at their best the gold standard.

@inthehands Protip: I've seen the embracing of hype very effectively slow down projects! And bikeshedding too!

And besides that gives to spend time learning the "new" tech...

Not that I have the patience to do work I don't believe in...

@inthehands "Let's make a committee to study the best way to enact your fascist plan! We'll break out into work groups that will report back to the committee of the whole."

@inthehands Let me talk with the team during our next sprint planning session and we’ll figure out when we can prioritize that ticket. We should probably spend at least one sprint hashing out the design, since it’s so important to get this right. Also Bob is on vacation next week

@inthehands "I heard Google's writing 25% of their code with AI now,"

@joe “we need to set a benchmark of 25% minimum AI code to meet Google-level quality benchmarks”

@inthehands @dumbledope wonder how many times this kind of thing has been carried out, but never discovered so the would-be resisters went down in history as collaborators

@inthehands @dumbledope that's weighing on me a bit in considering reactions between "don't quit your job if assigned to the Torment Nexus project, instead put sand in the gears" and "anyone who accepts a salary for working on the Torment Nexus team is a Nazi"

@aburka @dumbledope
Per my thread, I think •this• time around, you don’t quit. My personal opinion.