I’m certain the accumulating small bugs and instabilities that I’m noticing almost every day in previously reliable, decades-old software has nothing at all to do with the fact that the retention teams have been dissolved or else coerced into working on AI features no one wants.
The most important thing to understand about the huge federal layoffs—which the Supreme Court just cleared the way to continue—is that they are a strategic attack on equality in all workplaces: https://unbreaking.org/issues/equality-at-work-decimating-the-federal-workforce/
Solidarity with DC33 as their strike extends into a second week. Sanitation workers are the most critical workers in the city and they deserve not only a living wage but a thriving one. https://www.inquirer.com/politics/philadelphia/dc33-strike-health-benefits-residency-20250707.html
Lessons from another healthcare system gutted by austerity measures: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/autonomy
“The truth is quite simple: we don’t know what to do because there’s not just one thing to do.” https://prisonculture.substack.com/p/the-struggle-is-permanent-keep-fighting
“Technological change is not an external force to which societies must simply adapt; it is a socially and politically mediated process.” https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/is-the-ai-bubble-about-to-burst
You should read every “here’s how AI will change your job” in the context of who has the power to change the conditions of work, and how that power is exercised. And remember that major changes to working conditions come about in one of two ways: as negotiation, and as coercion.
“Giving up on the idea that truth matters is not just cynicism, it’s surrender.” https://www.citationneeded.news/it-matters-i-care/
“Artificial intelligence is currently busy completely de-caring human existence by optimizing life and doing away with the future as a source of care.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/de-caring
“They have turned these indifferent and extractive technologies into instruments of protest. They are weaponizing the accountability sink.” https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-weaponization-of-waymo
The thing that keeps coming up as I talk to people about AI in their workplaces is how dehumanizing it is. It’s dehumanizing to ask a machine to do something, and then have to correct it over and over; it’s dehumanizing to be told to read something that involved little to no human effort to make.
“While the upsides of adopting LLM technology to you as a worker might seem marginally useful now, that adoption directly contributes to that extraction, ultimately devaluing labor.” https://henry.codes/writing/economics-and-labor-rights-in-ai-skepticism/
“It is very very disturbing that your response is always to lie.” https://amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-ex-machina
One way to know that “AI is coming for your jobs” is a bluff is to see it paired with “and cancer will be cured.” The same Ferengis pushing AI are also working to cut funding for medical research! No cure for cancer is forthcoming without working scientists. https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-jobs-apocalypse-is-for-the
Again: work (both students’ and teachers’) that has been deskilled, de-spirited, and stripped of all creativity and joy. Appalled on behalf of the teachers, and so so sad for the students. https://www.404media.co/teachers-are-not-ok-ai-chatgpt/
There’s lots I want to write about this work, but for today I will say that working on this page (and project) has made abundantly clear the way the assault on all our freedoms runs right through our workplaces. https://unbreaking.org/issues/equality-at-work-decimating-the-federal-workforce/
On dangerous questions and even more dangerous (but liberating) answers: https://everythingchanges.us/blog/cant-and-wont/
This month marks 25 years since I last drove a car. My favorite form of transportation continues to be: legs.
The dream of a more automated workplace is over one hundred years old and it has always been about deskilling. https://anildash.com/2025/04/19/ai-first-is-the-new-return-to-office
“In times of crisis, the (sound) advice from old movement heads is to do what you’re already good at, right where you are.” https://www.wrecka.ge/the-work-at-hand/
“I want to be in dialogue with my website, my work & the people who find it. Not have it be just a space where I publish posts and art, but a living work itself. I want to engage with and collaborate with it. I want to inform it and for it to inform me.” https://fromemily.com/website-manifesto/
Somewhere in the midst of the javascript frameworks and the nonsense valuations and the shitty AI features and the RTO plans and the godawful union busting, we forgot how much joy there is in making websites. Whatever happens with work from here, we need to get it back.
“You cannot restrict unfreedom to a particular class of people. It will metastasize to consume the entire society.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/opinion/trump-court-order-constitution.html
I want to suggest, apropos of nothing at all, that if you want think about what it would be like to colonize the sea, you could do worse than read Sarah Pinsker’s Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea: https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/sooner-or-later-everything-falls-into-the-sea
Semi-regular reminder that my posts don’t originate in the likely place you’re reading them, but start on my site and ship themselves off elsewhere; here’s the story of how and why I’m doing that: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/coming-home
“My last contribution to the analyst water cooler was explaining how venture capital is like welfare for white men because I like to keep my offerings short and sweet.” https://sabrina.ghost.io/2-legit-2-tariff/
“How do we untangle our lives from violence that has been ready-made for easy, thoughtless perpetuation? How do we challenge narratives…that ask us to accept and explain it away?” https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/04/24/legacies-of-japanese-american-incarceration-brandon-shimoda/
“Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/telling
“This is a distributed denial of service attack on the good parts of the World Wide Web.” https://adactio.com/journal/21831
Not a joke: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/foolish
Some patterns I’ve observed in the moves and countermoves that workers are making in response to the direct, violent, and unconstitutional attacks on human rights, life-sustaining infrastructure, and work itself: https://everythingchanges.us/blog/keep-moving/
“It felt as if my presence, my dancing with abandon, had manifested a safer space, a space where we all could be free.” http://okayfail.com/2024/my-year-of-raves.html
“The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.” https://archive.is/IgUWd#selection-5015.288-5015.519
“Because federal law does not in fact prohibit DEI, Trump is presumably counting on his order having a chilling effect, hoping that institutions self-censor by abandoning the programs out of fear.” https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/03/10/profiles-in-self-censorship-dei/
This lovely post from Ethan (https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/commencement/) is a good reminder that just because a job ends doesn’t mean you have to say farewell to your work friends; you can take your friends to go! https://everythingchanges.us/blog/work-friends/
Part of my deep frustration with polling is how much it centers one people’s beliefs over the consequences other people bear as a result. “57% of Omelans support torture of child” is not the fucking mandate some people think it is!
“Assurances that we’ll all find other jobs before too long miss the point. We don’t necessarily want other jobs. We don’t want sympathy. We want our work, and the places we’ve done that work, to be recognized and valued.” https://www.hcn.org/articles/losing-more-than-a-forest-service-job
“But we can’t let machines do our human accounting for us, nor allow Trumpism to lead the whole of humanity into a binary, Manichean world of number ones versus human zeroes. Of those who matter and those who don’t.” https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/03/02/trump-gaza-number-one
Among other things, targeting 18F sends a clear message that tech workers are being coerced into serving the needs of capital. Even for those who never took it, civic tech work held the promise of escape, the dream of using tech for good. And dreams are dangerous.
Keeping things moving in the war on work. https://everythingchanges.us/blog/what-is-your-work-now/
This memo from a bunch of lawyers about the legality of DEI programs is admirably readable and plainly argued and seems like it would be useful in a lot of contexts: https://drive.google.com/file/d/129LVji0weEUdpl-mbWMFWHKU7n5ZSRfX/view
The kicker in this piece from Megan Marz about the shitshow that is hiring tech is simultaneously very instructive and entirely terrifying: https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/hiring-squad-marz
“What’s happening right now is also a labor story.” Yes, yes it is. https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/leaving-18f/
“The tools used to erase trans and non-binary people are the same tools used against feminism. They are the same tools used to advance white supremacy.” https://feministkilljoys.substack.com/p/oh-cruel-world
Applications are open until Thursday for the spring speculative fiction work/shop! Join a small group of people to think in community about how your work needs to change to meet the moment—and to move towards brighter futures. https://everythingchanges.us/workshop/sf
Thinking with Le Guin about living with uncertainty: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/make-life-possible
Hearing from tech folks fed up with layoffs and bad AI features who are ready to connect with their fave peers to build small, sustainable services and products & I just want to say if any of you want a fierce sidekick along for the ride, I would love to talk. https://everythingchanges.us/contact/
For no reason at all, find myself thinking often of this couplet from the Tao, in Le Guin’s rendition: “The disordered society / is full of loyal patriots.”
This is very good on several fronts, and also I want to underscore the bit about automation here: a big thread running through what’s happening in both tech and government right now is a concerted effort to deskill workers. https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-real-reason-metas-bleak-ai-vision
Something I’m chewing on with respect to Erin’s post here is that so much of the story about what’s happening now is oriented towards what certain people claim to be doing—and so little of it is about who gets hurt when those claims comes true. https://erinkissane.com/against-entropy
“I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.” https://www.mavenproductions.com/letter-to-a-young-activist
“The word ‘obedience’ derives from ear, to obey is to give your ear to law or to the tyrant who suspends the law, replacing it with his own will. A feminist ear might be how we hear the instructions by refusing to follow them; hearing with defiance not compliance.” https://feministkilljoys.substack.com/p/changing-institutions
Really important detail in this piece from an anon OPM employee: if you do not already have your coworker’s mobile numbers, or haven’t set up a secure backchannel to talk, do it now. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/opm-fork-musk-trump-federal-personnel-management-employee.html
“a nation which colonizes…is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/boomerang
“To proceed in a hostile world, call it an experiment. Admit that you don’t know how to do it, but ask for space and peace and respect. Then try your experiment, quietly.” Erin Kissane thinking with Ursula Franklin is what I needed today: https://www.wrecka.ge/ursulas-list/
Love and solidarity to the folks at 18f getting sucked into this horrible void. If anyone needs a sympathetic ear to talk out what to do from here, my door is open. https://www.404media.co/github-is-showing-the-trump-administration-scrubbing-government-web-pages-in-real-time/
“It is the subtlest shift that shifts everything: from…I really must choose the best path to…I chose the best path, at least for me to, finally, simply: I chose. I chose and it might have been otherwise.” https://sarahendren.com/2025/01/20/choosing/
“I have been thinking of that no, how we need to say it more, or need more to say it.” https://feministkilljoys.substack.com/p/no-is-not-a-lonely-utterance
Thinking with Roger Deakin about machines and trees and how we mediate the space between hand and machine, between object and owner. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/messengers-of-a-world-above-nature
For every friend who needs to quit their job that you send this post to, a witch earns her staff: https://everythingchanges.us/blog/abscission/
“That is why, mostly, liberation is from definition. This is no mere negative model of freedom (freedom from rather than freedom to). To be liberated from definition is how we open up what it is possible to do and to be.” https://feministkilljoys.com/2024/07/10/define-women-and-other-patriarchal-instructions/
Very relieved about the Philly stadium plan falling through, and damn if this isn’t a lesson to city councils everywhere: stop playing games with billionaires! https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/live/sixers-arena-news-philadelphia-center-city-stadium-20250113.html/card-458838513
Erin is (as usual) exactly right about the ways the big platforms are in “bad shape,” and I’d also argue it isn’t just the social platforms—it’s all of the data-grabbing, ad-supported monstrosities. https://www.wrecka.ge/bad-shape/
All of the nonsense about so-called artificial “intelligence” has the notion of intelligence backwards: becoming intelligent does not make you alive. To be alive is to be intelligent. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/our-words
I think there are several pretty straight lines between the sycophancy we’re witnessing from tech owners, and the ways that workplaces are structured as mechanisms for reproducing obedience and servility. Fascism thrives on people doing what they’re told to do.
“Everyone transitions. Let’s say that again. Everyone transitions. Everyone is transitioning, present continuous.” YES. http://okayfail.com/garden/everyone-transitions.html
“The Shing law forbids killing, but they killed knowledge, they burned books, and what may be worse, they falsified what’s left. They slipped in the Lie.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/they-killed-knowledge
Reentry is a difficult but magical time—a suspension of ordinary expectations and frameworks, a chance to re-story our work and our place within it. https://everythingchanges.us/blog/reentry/
“For there is so little time to waste during a life, what little there is being so precious, that we must waste it, in whatever way we come to waste it, with all our heart.” Signing off for the year. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/waste-time
Talking to my partner, who (regretfully) watched the new Alien last night, and realizing that all mainstream movie/music production is just necromancy: raising the defleshed, unspirited bones of past art and parading them around. Tamsyn Muir warned us!
I’ve worked with a lot of folks who’ve been through layoffs these past few years, and one thing we do not talk enough about is how often a layoff is received with relief bordering on joy. And what that says about the state of work.
Going to send the rare email-only newsletter later this week, with some (re)reading recommendations for the winter break. Get on the list: https://aworkinglibrary.com/subscribe/
“My body had refused to participate in my refusal (or failure?) to refuse untenable demands. That’s, like, a triple negative. Put differently: my brain couldn’t stop me, so that tiny but mighty intestinal diverticulum did.” https://wordsinspace.net/2024/12/13/the-limits-of-refusal/
Dispiriting, if clarifying, to watch Philadelphia sell Chinatown to billionaire sports team owners, despite massive public opposition. So-called Democratic cities are no bulwark against late capitalism and fascism. https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/live/sixers-arena-city-council-vote-protests-20241212.html
Echoes of Ursula Franklin’s definition of a technology as a practice in this piece about defining AI from Ali Alkhatib: “AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power.” https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai
“Liberalism persists, in large part, through a fantasy that the U.S. government can be reformed to care for us, and that we should focus on trying to get it to do so.” https://truthout.org/articles/our-best-option-for-defending-ourselves-from-trumps-second-term-is-each-other/
“It is useless work that darkens the heart.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/living-in-alignment
“What we’re called to ask is why the murder of one man must be described as unspeakable violence, but the systemic denial of life to 100,000 people is an acceptable business practice.” https://www.jphilll.com/p/whats-a-life-worth
Last chance to apply for the speculative fiction work/shop! Applications close in just over an hour. https://everythingchanges.us/workshop/sf
I love Obsidian and think that small, indy, and subscription- (not VC-) supported apps are the way to go. But the dependence on a plugin infrastructure does not hold up when so many of the plugins are obviously abandoned. Absent funding, all infrastructure crumbles, sooner rather than later.
“Thankfully we’re mostly past the collective delusion that work is family, but a workplace is still made up of people, and it is still a community of relationships. This community can also be a network of care if you let it.” https://phirephoenix.com/blog/2024-11-27/values
Applications are now open for the speculative fiction work/shop! This five-week program is for anyone who feels stuck and unfulfilled in their work and who wants to open up some space—and community—to imagine different futures. Learn more: https://everythingchanges.us/workshop/sf
Caring for your colleagues—caring for anyone—makes you vulnerable. But it also makes you human, and alive, and aware of your own collective power, capable of not only standing up to that harm but of building new worlds. https://everythingchanges.us/blog/care-work/
Visionary organizing “begins by creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing system.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/storytelling-as-practice
Realized recently that I’ve been silently saying the word “ammar” to myself when I meet someone and don’t know how to address them. But maybe it’s time to voice that word, to manifest the relation by speaking it aloud. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/ammari
Too much I could say about this very excellent piece from Erin, but I will start with noting that one way to shape the future of the web is to pay closer attention to the stories we use to talk about it: https://www.wrecka.ge/against-the-dark-forest/
Both the Church & the Republican party commit “a moral error of gross proportion by projecting the specter of [their] own abusive history onto gender minorities as a way of making others responsible for [their] own crimes.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/projection
Wrote about dreaming, and propaganda, and networks—and the capacity and creativity we have to get through even the darkest of days: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/dreaming-awake
Take small steps. Favor reversibility. Plan on surprises and human inventiveness. How to navigate in uncertain times: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/take-small-steps
Semi-regular reminder that if you have been ordered back to the office, but have colleagues in other offices—you’re still remote. Act accordingly.
“How often is it acknowledged that people thrive better in lower stimulus environments?” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/lower-stimulus-environments
Big +1 to this counsel to have a digital sabbath: https://lefttoourowndevices.blog/j20-minus-66-try-a-digital-sabbath/ Turning my devices off on Saturday evenings and not turning them back on until mid-Monday morning has been such a healing salve for my brain.
Le Guin’s advice—read when you cannot write, sleep when you cannot read—has been top of mind all week and I am intensely grateful.
I started practicing reading the news less when I still worked with a newsroom & the thing that’s always worked is to have a book—a physical book, real paper—at hand at all times. Short stories and poetry are great for dipping in & out of, but anything that holds my attention does the trick.
I turned to Annalee Newitz to think about the current state of propaganda and disinformation and I do not regret it: https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/stories-are-weapons
(And I’m chewing on a thought here about how we are all armed to the teeth.)
One of the great privileges of spending so much time listening to people talk about their work is those moments when people realize things not only can change but they will change—and that they have the power to shape that change. https://everythingchanges.us/blog/writing-a-living-future/
It can seem terrifically dangerous to dream these days, but we cannot build a future that we cannot imagine. Join a small gathering to imagine a future of work that serves the living: https://everythingchanges.us/workshop/sf
“acting with agency is the primary way to avoid being traumatized by negative experiences. Whether you win or lose, the act of fighting is enough to help our brains process what has happened.” https://margaretkilljoy.substack.com/p/the-sky-is-falling-weve-got-this
“Purpose preempts despair,” writes Kelly Hayes. I think the reverse is also true: to live without purpose is to cultivate despair, to fuel it and feed it. https://organizingmythoughts.org/power-up-resources-for-the-road-ahead/