“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