Can Mass Labor Action Succeed?

I heard UPS is about to face a strike bigger than anything in US history, while the writers and actors are out in solidarity as we speak. There’s a possible outcome of these mass labor actions that I don’t know if any of these glorious fighters are prepared to face.  Can’t the corporations involved just let themselves fail?

Think about it.  These fucks all have insurance on their insurance on their insurance, financial vehicles that are impossible for human minds to handle in their complexity.  Shit that makes big math brains reach for the calculator, all constructed to absolve any rich person from ever truly losing.  Golden parachutes, bankruptcy laws more generous than anything even the millionaire class has available to them.

Couldn’t the paymasters of UPS see a labor force that has become unmanageable and just say, fuck it, UPS doesn’t exist anymore, and all laugh their way to the fucking bank, and live out the rest of their lives in crystal palaces drinking unicorn blood wine and masturbating to surgery videos, or whatever it takes to make a billionaire shoot his goo?

I think the financial system has become a million times more sophisticated since the days of labor action past, when the bosses had to resort to machine gun massacres.  I think the only real mass action that can succeed at this point is stuff that rejects the system completely, works outside of it.  Don’t try to make the industry equitable, just build anarcho-syndicalist schemes that allow you to work outside of the industry altogether.  Dark UPS, deliver my packages.  I’ll pay you in potatoes and unused oxycodone from my last dental work.  Dark Hollywood, make us the movies you could never have made under Time-Warner-AOL-Starbucks-Huawei-Purina.

That’s my fear on one hand, and my dream on the other.  Good luck to the strikers just the same, and long live the fighters.

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Marcel Duchamp Would Love AI Art

Content Warning: I link to videos that show clips of Tucker Carlson, and the thumbnails show his crappy fucken face.

Remember when that guy put a urinal on a gallery wall and signed it “R Mutt”?  Remember Marcel Duchamp, and all the other people who really called into question just what “art” actually is, back in the 20th century?  If you’re only going to learn about one artist from the 1900s, it should be Duchamp.  While he was alive, so many other artists were on his jock, it was wild.  Salvador Dalí wished he could be as cool as Marcel.  Anyway, just thinking about how AI art has all the cowards babbling through rage tears, and how that would be absolutely irresistible temptation to the pranksters of art.  You’re making yourselves into clownbait, AI haters.  Watch out.

Marcel Duchamp depicted in AI art

“Marcel Duchamp showing off his AI-generated art on his laptop, he is proud and satisfied with his work.” -by anonymous, using Midjourney

Some only sorta related thoughts on AI art:  The people fighting it right now are so very much like the original Luddites, it’s kinda sad.  Fighting for labor is a good instinct, if what you’re fighting for is worth preserving.  But there are jobs that are rendered obsolete by technology, and just should be.  Here are a couple of very short videos from leftesque yewchoober “Big Joel,” on the “Little Joel” channel meant to replace his abandoned ElonWorld account.  They are not specifically about AI art and he might even have a different opinion if that was the subject of discussion, but the arguments definitely apply.  Don’t worry about the title; he is disagreeing with some weird fools claiming the nazi demagogue had said something decent for a change… [Read more…]

You Sang The Union Forever

The dream began with a sort of video game scenario, wherein I was a non-blue native american analog on an alien world.  I had to fight the big bad with only the power to purify poisons he produced.  I had to level up on some Dragon Ball bullshit.  There were other anime tropes involved in the scenario.  After the final battle I was trying to find clothing to wear and famous voice actor / internet funnyman SungWon “prozd” Cho was there, with some people fanning out about his anime parody content.  Despite now finding myself in the classic “where are my clothes” dream scenario, I was thinking of myself as the creator of the anime bullshit I had just played out, and I wanted to mention that to him – seeking praise from the master of that art form.  But since I was basically naked, I had to yell at him from around the corner.

This transitioned somehow to another part of the dream that was a big elaborate musical about the invention of labor unions.  It was full of ludicrous anti-history, bad songs, and Oscar bait cast, which in my head was anybody famous that I had seen recently on the internet, whether or not they would actually be cast in an Oscar bait movie – Johnny Depp, Brendan Fraser, Nicole Kidman, but also the guy that played Negan on Walking Dead, and some of those ladies from Klymaxx.  Negan was playing an intellectually delayed dude that was leading the union charge.  He also fancied himself a songwriter, but had really bad ideas.  In one scene he was trying to explain a song idea about a mixing bowl to Elvis Presley.  I was there and felt the need to explain that musicals are horrible, which in the context of this particular scene would be lampshading.

Johnny Depp was using an anachronistic computer terminal in this ambiguous early 20th century steel mill and discovered that he had a “demerit” in the system, without knowing what it was or how he had incurred it.  This would be the launching point for a subplot about how unions will protect you from arbitrary punishment, with rules about how you must be informed of impending disciplinary action and be allowed to defend yourself from them.

Then Brendan Fraser had to go talk to the boss lady and do more singing that my subconscious was ill-equipped to fill in the lyrics of, until I got tired of this and woke up at 8:50 in the morning.  And now this – the glorious reward for anybody who clicked my “subscribe” button in the sidebar.
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Who Are You? (Owl Impression)

Politics, amirite?  Hooboy.  This will be the last article in my attempt to top all categories of FtB articles, unless some sneaky fucker edges me out of one of the categories I already topped.  Get it, I’m a top.  I kid, you know I switch.  OK I’m probably a pillow princess but you know I got a bad back.  LL Cool J would rap about banging my girlfriend if I had one.  Remember that line?

OK, so politics, I know I’ve been thinking something about this lately, what was it?  Hm…  Oh yeah.  Last night while I was non-sleeping, I was trying to explain myself to the mute audience in my head, and felt the need to preface my arguments with who I am, politically.  I haven’t felt the need to put that into words much, so here it is.

I’m a personal anarchist.  I think society should have laws but that all people should be willing to break them, as needed, to suit our personal ethos.  Be willing to do the time for your crimes, but be willing to do the crimes you feel are most necessary.

I’m a socialist, maybe even a communist, at the end of the day.  No allegiance to the ghost of the USSR, no worries in that Charly.  I just know that in a world where every inch is owned by either the government or billionaires, there is no room for any person to truly meet all their own needs.

In the USA we live by that myth.  All our laws are constructed around an idea grown more absurd every day, that every person can work, and that the fruit of that labor can be sufficient to care for us through our whole lives.  If we, the poor, can’t have one fucking thing that isn’t fragile as hell, can’t have any social safety net to pick us up when getting worked at this rate inevitably breaks us, then the government needs to step up with cradle-to-grave social services, given generously and without stipulation.  And as far as the commune goes, that isn’t just breaking your back with a hoe.  I think all Hollywood movie-making and corporate art should ultimately be destroyed and replaced with artists working communally to make art for its own sake, profit as incidental rather than the sole motivating factor to make or do anything.  And tech and science and education and child-rearing.  There are many things that can be done communally.

The rich bore me as much as they oppress me.  Their idea of the good life, of what is worthwhile at all, it’s a cosmically bad joke.  I’d be OK with them existing, with their cheek implants and lambos, if they could just leave it at that and not suck us dry at every opportunity.  They can’t be trusted with what they have.  Class war now, babes.

I keed, I keed.  Or do I?  I do.  Unless..?  Ahaha, I had you going.  Or maybe…
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EDIT – I DID IT!!!! I’M NUMBER ONE!!!!  for as long as it lasts.

USA People: Escape the Private Sector!

From retail workers who will never escape poverty to techbros striving for their first million, USA people working for private companies are ruthlessly exploited, pushed to the limits of mind and body, and fucked over at every possible turn.  From what I’ve seen, government jobs are more secure and have more built-in protection by far than anything on offer in the private sector.  Looking to escape the boom-bust cycle of getting laid off or bought out every two years, endlessly taking new jobs for fewer and fewer dollars of rapidly decreasing value?  Good news!

The president’s vaccine mandate is passing its late deadline for federal employees (contractors had a more generous timeline), and antivax fuckos are getting bounced from the government en masse!  Job openings galore!  Sure veterans and the disabled get priority, but there will be more than enough jobs to reach the rest of you too.  Go to USAjobs.gov and commit your life to public service.  It isn’t glamorous, but it’s necessary, and so much less brutal than the private sector.  I’m looking at you, Orange Julius and Walmart employees.  Now’s your chance!

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Hot Tip to Unionize Video Games Now

Get a load of this shit: Activision-Blizzard Hires Amazon Union-Busting Firm.  As Boots Riley from the Coup said, “If we’re ever gonna do it let’s do it now.”  That is to say, when a government agency in a state with anti-worker wildcat strike laws decides to bring charges against a company for fucking massive systemic sexual harassment, and as employees start to organize, and that is their response?  Workers of the world unite!

The game industry is massive in profits thanks to selling gambling to children, but small in workforce, which makes it extremely vulnerable to labor revolt.  It hasn’t happened yet only because douchebros attach sucking corporate ass product to their sense of manhood and identity, and have stacked the industry with like-minded people.

But the video game industry, like all creative industries, is so vicious and life-draining that even scumbag misogynist right wingers last an average of two years there before flaming out and going back to work at Electronics Boutique.  The sausage is made out of art students and young programmers, and management thinks nothing of it because there’s always a new graduating class to brainrape (or sometimes just physically rape).

So here’s how you do it.  Organize their asses before they leave the schools.  You can’t do this at one school or you’ll just get the grads there shadowbanned.  You need to hit them all at the same time.  There are not that many schools producing video game creators.  Find them, do not involve the faculty in any way, and infiltrate their shit.  Full court propaganda press.

You get enough traction and make these vampire businesses face a united group of graduates saying NO.  I don’t have the time to do a two year unpaid internship, or take starvation wages.  NO.  It is not acceptable to make drinking to excess normal during business hours.  NO.  Seriously, your entire fucking culture must die, now, so that the silly people who love video games enough to want to make them can stop being chewed up and shit out.  Having a dream should not make you into so much bloody meat for billionaire pit bulls.

Video game workers of the world unite.  You have nothing to lose but your mass exploitation.

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