“We must dare to prepare ourselves for the Exodus from ‘work-based society’: it no longer exists and will not return.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/exit-strategy
“All their memories interlock and look down the same path to the same places. Each memory reflects another, repeats, reinforces, until the known becomes the only.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/other-side
“A photograph cannot inspire an antiwar movement if the antiwar movement has been spirited away in the night to a facility in Louisiana.” https://www.theverge.com/features/761076/gaza-images-starvation-tiktok-ban
Love a wildcat strike. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/17/government-orders-striking-air-canada-flight-attendants-return-work
Nicola Griffith’s first novel is about making a home, and remembering the past, and the impossible beauty and danger of knowing women are human. https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/ammonite
Hearing of more jobs with “no remote, but you can work from either the SF or NYC office,” and, just, what are we talking about here? This isn’t about “remote” work, whatever we think that means; it’s about power. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/remote-to-who
I am developing a theory of institutions as reproducers of cowardice and I am not happy about it. https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/negotiating-with-terrorists-unsuccessfully
Notable here that the weapon being used to take power away from Congress is layoffs. You tear down government by attacking the workers who make government happen. https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/when-youre-a-star-the-supreme-court
“The greatest danger that fear poses [is] not panic amid disorder, but cooperation with an order that we ought to find unspeakable.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/obligation-to-possibility
“What you have is, in essence, a very grassroots and cheap approach to launder misinformation to the public.” https://www.404media.co/googles-ai-is-destroying-search-the-internet-and-your-brain/
The “culture of fear” noted here is something that I’m seeing across all big tech, and it’s suicidal: frightened workers either quit or comply. They don’t take risks, they don’t create anything new, and they don’t ship. Nothing good will come of this. https://www.theverge.com/notepad-microsoft-newsletter/709144/microsoft-layoffs-2025-ai-notepad
Coming at Nicola Griffith’s Aud Torvingen books after reading Hild and Menewood is like meeting one of Hild’s descendants: https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/blue-place
“I’m good at this job. Rather, I was good at this job—and I’ll become so again in an environment whose values align with those that animate my work: the small, the weird, the local, the public, the principled.” https://wordsinspace.net/2025/06/30/i-prefer-weeds-to-ivy/
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.