in most places i’ve lived, my physical neighbours did not want to be known, and did not want to know anyone else, either. granted, most of them really only used their apartments/houses as a very expensive sleeping place and nothing more. they didn’t really live in their houses; it was just where they usually slept between working.

even when the neighbours were friendly, there were no common spaces and the housing too small to accommodate get-togethers, and no third places to go to. and the friendly neighbours were always apart of the conspicuously racist pensioner cabal.

growing up, the most common ‘counterargument’ (read: dismission) to ‘global warming’ i heard was ‘great, i love summer!’

i had to become a singer before i had the lung capacity to sigh hard enough.

after paying off the debt to mine and my partner’s physical and psychological health?

i’d take back up community organising. and music. i’d like to curate a library (of books and things) and run it as a community centre. i’d facilitate book clubs and popular education, give lectures, join research groups, and take up writing again. i’d design and run tabletop games and games clubs.

more materially, whatever oddjobs need done, and whatever my neighbours need help with. i have a lot of varied experience with ‘disability’; having experience in social work, having multiple disabilities myself, and taking care of people with them. i’d use my techn(olog)ical and mechanical experience to fix stuff, and to design, install, maintain and programme community infrastructure. i’d like to join a rewilding initiative and help to keep the local environment clean.

and i’d lean in hard on whatever hyperfixations strike me that month. (and maybe really have something to show for it.)

deleted by creator

Would you work your whole life to just create FOSS?

yes, if it has social value and brings meaning to my life.

you can drop the word ‘just’: i wouldn’t just do any one thing, and neither would most people if given the opportunity to do more than just their 9 to 5.

there is more to life than feeding the mute compulsion for private wealth and fame. the driving force of most people is to be comfortable and to belong, and the two are intertwined. in our current society, private wealth and fame are the path to comfort (it’s debateable whether the wealthy have any sense of ‘belonging’).

a lot of people really do want to do things just for the joy or intellectual stimulation of doing it, and to do so without having the joy sucked out of it by economic imperatives enforced from on high by a nepotic sadomasochist in a suit. there is nothing more humiliating than being forced to play a game you had no part in making, that you can’t say say no to, and that exists only as a form of power imposed on you.

Linux powers the majority of servers, supercomputers and embeddeds. Apache HTTP Server and nginx power over 70% of websites, and used to account for almost 100% of all web servers. PHP is used by 80% of websites. MySQL is most likely the datastore for those websites. Git, Subversion, and Mercurial make up the majority of version control systems used for software and research. Python is the language of choice for machine learning and other data sciences. chances are that most websites you connect to via HTTPS are using OpenSSL. Hadoop and Kubernetes powers ‘big data’. core protocols like DNS, HTTP, SMTP, TCP/IP were developed as FLOSS. in their respective industries, there’s also Android, Audacity, Blender, Firefox, GIMP, InkScape, Krita…

i’m going to preëmpt your use of the word ‘free’ here. all of this required a great deal of time, effort and infrastructure. developers still need to eat, and that means the money came from somewhere. it is ‘free’ in the sense that: it is given, not sold; that it was a collaborative volunteer effort; and that you can do whatever you want with it. just because some developers receive some sort of compensation — or work a dayjob and have to survive in a capitalist system — does not mean we need fixed-schedule, ass-in-seats, top-down hostage wage labour to accomplish anything valuable at scale.

if your argument is ultimately ‘i don’t want anything to change’, you could’ve just opened with that instead of JAQing off.

good post. two notes:

Not sure if this is the original intent, but I personally see it as not requiring individuals to work a standard work week to survive.

that is what antiwork — and thus the meaning of this community — is: the critique of work, where work refers to wage labour and performative toil, as this wholly separate sphere of/from life, and its origins as a system of control, and the psychological, physical and environmental harms it brings. it is not against labour conceptually; it is fundamentally anticapitalist.

this community has a way of ragebaiting bad faith, law-and-order liberals browsing All; who don’t read the sidebar, who have fully internalised the Protestant work ethic, and who think ‘work’ refers to both ‘all labour’ and ‘wage labour’, and who think dispossession and wage labour are necessary to prevent everyone from getting depression or turning into Fallout raiders.

All this said - I have no idea if this will work out positively, highly doubtful it could happen at a large scale, recognize there is likely 1000 holes here and new problems to arise, and don’t fully believe it’s feasible nor that I’m remotely intelligent enough to claim this has any real grounding.

political imaginaries don’t need to be completely fleshed out ten steps in advance. it’s enough just to identify a problem. it’s more than enough to start imagining the first steps to solving those problems. you don’t need anyone’s permission to imagine.

the implementation details are not important at an abstract level. those would reveal themselves as a natural consequence of implementation, and the details would be unique to every social and cultural environment.

Uber eats

oh no! my treats! /s

so, if people don’t have the conditions of life held hostage by labour-buyers, the world would end? …why would the water be poisoned? what did i say about conflating ‘work’ with ‘labour’ or ‘doing literally anything [at all]’?

there would still be people who want to operate public utilities[0]. there would still be electricians. and plumbers. and what about microgrids?

this also wouldn’t happen overnight, which you make it sound like it would. or is this like when someone suggests phasing out fossil fuels? and some lemmy.world username says ‘if we suddenly abruptly instantly instantaneously directly rapidly CTRL+A-CTRL+X’d all oil in the world right now it’d be just like in the Mad Max!’

less than 27% of paid labour is serving real needs[1]. there is a lot of shit that we don’t need, that provides no social value, and that we could do without[2]. the individualist ratrace separates us from our communities, which are perfectly capable of taking care of us, even and *especially* in a crisis[3],[4],[5]. a managerial class is not necessary to operate public utilities[6].

if people want electricity, or running water, they will arrange for it. if absolutely nobody in the community knows how, they find someone who does and they make a deal.

most ‘work’ would probably be automated. automation is really more viable in a postcapitalist setting because there is no profit incentive getting in the way of the time for innovation to make reliable, longevous systems that aren’t intentionally cheap and intended to break within 2 – 5 years.

so, i don’t really see how ‘EVERYTHING would grind to a halt’ unless ‘EVERYTHING’ is ‘precisely the way things are now in whatever the present moment is’.

everyone would have more time to support each other, pursue their interests, and do other things that really matter.

don’t conflate ‘work’ with ‘labour’ or ‘doing literally anything’.