March 10, 2023

📡 – 2023-03-10

Three Quick Labor Things before we get to The Stuff:

1. NLRB Says Sub-subcontactors are Joint Goog Employees

Alphabet (née Google) is a lot like the Defense Department in that though its ranks are thicc they nonetheless depend on a legion of outside agencies (who themselves often rely on freelancers) to get work done. There is, yes, an Alphabet Industrial Complex; in fact, Alphabet has more contract employees than direct employees.

One such group of sub-subcontractors is based in Austin, Texas and works on YouTube Music, mostly doing data verification: “…ensuring videos are correctly labeled and looking into requests from users of YouTube Music.” Those ~60 contractors, hired by Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. (could not have come up with a better corp. name for Fun City if I tried), recently began a union drive. Not long after that drive started they were told remote work would end, and they would have to return to the office. But the group had mostly started work during the pandemic; none had never stepped foot in a YouTube office and many can’t. They saw this as a rather transparent act of Union Busting, and went on a one day strike last month, pushing for this and other issues like fair pay.

At the end of 2022, the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) petitioned to represent those contractors when they expressed intention to unionize, and Alphabet pushed back, saying that they are not Alphabet Employees. The question eventually went to the NLRB, where a judge ruled this week that those sub-subcontractors are in fact jointly employed by the tech giant.

This means that, in the event Alphabet does not win its appeal vs the NLRB, and in the event those YouTube Music contractors do vote to form a union (a date is not yet set) this will be the first time Alphabet will have to collectively bargain with a group of its employees, as the AWU is a minority union which represents the demands of some employees, but cannot collectively bargain for the whole workforce.

If this goes all the way, it could be an impactful precedent in finally balancing some power in favor of the “shadow force” of contractors and freelancers that keeps so much of big tech afloat.

In related news, at the end of last month the AWU reported that their efforts were able to secure raises for some 5,000 contractors who “assess the quality of search”.

2. Michigan First State to Vote on Repeal of ‘Right to Work’ in 60 Years

In 2012, Michigan – a center of labor organization in the US – passed a “Right to Work” law. “Right to Work” is a doctrine which effectively allows non-union members to benefit from their workplace’s union by making it possible for those workers to opt out of paying union dues. This is couched in language about “freedom” and “choice” and of course “individual responsibility”. Right to Work support orgs refer to collective bargaining as “Forced Unionism”. But RtW is really just a corporation friendly piece of legislation which weakens the power of unions by reducing their main source of funding. When workers aren’t able to balance power with big businesses, workers lose, and that is no secret.

Currently, about half of the US States are Right to Work States, but this week the Michigan House voted to repeal their Right to Work Law. Two bills were part of the vote, one to repeal RtW for state employees, and one to repeal it for the private sector, and both passed. They still have to pass the Senate next week, and if they pass there they’ll go to Governor Whitmer.

Whitmer has said in the past both that she supports these pro-labor moves, but also that she would veto anything passed with an appropriation attached, which thus allows the bill to bypass referendum; such is the case with these two bills, so we’ll see which principle of hers wins out. If this passes, it’s a great win for unions in a state which – though union membership has declined of late – remains one of the most unionized in the country.

“Union dues are an important stream of revenue that help pay for critical contract negotiations, staff and support of members. When unions have decreased dues, they have less power to improve working conditions,” Weiss said from the House floor. - WEMU

3. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz Will Testify In Front of Congress

In the last two years, nearly 300 Starbucks locations have voted to unionize, something which the Corporate Arm of the company has done much in its power to thwart, including firing and relocating organizing employees, and even shutting down stores.

Recently, an NLRB judge said that Starbucks’ anti-union tactics were so egregious, they needed to “[r]ehire and Compensate Seven Unlawfully Fired Workers, Reopen a Facility, Bargain with the Union, Provide Union Access, Conduct Training and Post Remedial Notices at Stores”. Of course, Starbucks will appeal the decision.

As this has unfolded, Bernie Sanders – chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (“HELP”) Committee – has made several calls for Schultz to testify in front of Congress about wth is going on at the coffee chain. Schultz, the Interim CEO until sometime in the next couple months, has attempted to dodge the requests claiming that he isn’t really the person setting the anti-union agenda, but that’s clearly bullshit.

Facing a likely subpoena, Schultz this week agreed to testify voluntarily:

"After constructive discussions with committee staff, we have agreed that interim chief executive officer Howard Schultz will testify on behalf of Starbucks before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on March 29, 2023, at 10 a.m. ET," Zabrina Jenkins, the acting executive vice president and general counsel for Starbucks, said in a letter. - NBC News

Whats the goal? Bernie had this to say:

“I look forward to hearing from Mr. Schultz as to when he intends to end his illegal anti-union activities and begin signing fair first contracts with the unions.” - PBS

popcorn.gif, I guess.

Anyway! On to the stuff I liked…

👂

I’ve been on a

Real

Dub techno

Kick (har har)

Lately

🌊🌌☁️

📚

The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal

The Apple II Age

"...an extraordinary achievement in computer history..." - Joanne McNeil, author of Lurking: How a Person Became a User

My pal Laine Nooney – a computer historian – wrote a book about the Apple II computer and its part in giving rise to the existence of Everyday Computer Users:

Recounting a constellation of software creation stories, Nooney offers a new understanding of how the hobbyists’ microcomputers of the 1970s became the personal computer we know today. From iconic software products like VisiCalc and The Print Shop to historic games like Mystery House and Snooper Troops to long-forgotten disk-cracking utilities, The Apple II Age offers an unprecedented look at the people, the industry, and the money that built the microcomputing milieu—and why so much of it converged around the pioneering Apple II.

You can pre-order Laine’s book – out in May – at the link above, and I think you should.

A Unique Experiment That Could Make Social Media Better

A Unique Experiment That Could Make Social Media Better | WIRED

Academic researchers weren’t getting anywhere by criticizing Big Tech platforms, so we decided to try collaborating instead.

Our goal is to show that it’s technically possible to drive content selection algorithms by asking users about their experiences over a sustained period of time, rather than relying primarily on their immediate online reactions. 

How to stop the internet becoming a junk heap

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/science-and-technology/how-to-stop-the-internet-becoming-a-junk-heap-ethan-zuckerman-ai

We might also benefit from rethinking the incentives that make the current internet work. Spam is a function of an ad-supported internet with constant competition for users’ attention. If we worked on something closer to a subscription model, material would have to be higher quality for users to be willing to pay for it. And if systems like Reddit did not reward users simply for creating content that people happen to engage with, they would have fewer incentives to inflate their post count by publishing junk.

Silicon Valley’s Obsession With Killer Rogue AI Helps Bury Bad Behavior

Effective Altruism’s Problems Go Beyond Sam Bankman-Fried - Bloomberg

Sam Bankman-Fried made effective altruism a punchline, but its philosophy of maximum do-gooding masks a thriving culture of predatory behavior.

CW: Effective Altruism, Sexual Assault

The underlying ideology valorizes extremes: seeking rational truth above all else, donating the most money and doing the utmost good for the most important reason. This way of thinking can lend an attractive clarity, but it can also provide cover for destructive or despicable behavior. Eight women in these spaces allege pervasive sexual misconduct, including abuse and harassment, that they say has frequently been downplayed. Even among people with pure intentions, adherents say, EA and rationalist ideologies can amplify the suffering of people prone to doomsday thinking—leading, for a few, to psychotic breaks.

The yassification of Ozempic

The yassification of Ozempic

No bigger red flag than describing a weight-loss trend as something "everyone" is doing.

It’s presumptuous of this article, which fails to treat so many aspects of this topic with appropriate skepticism, to declare the body positivity experiment over wholesale, on the basis of its shivering and shaking “all the girlies are taking Ozempic” premise. Imagine having so narrow a conception of politics, of bodily existence, that the world cannot possibly contain people with a BMI over 25 who are entitled to some basic amount of self-acceptance, and Adele, who lost weight over a period of multiple years concurrent with a number of habit changes that would have impacted that, regardless of whatever drugs someone wants to cheekily imply she took. “How quickly we’ve abandoned our contortions and commitments to acceptance as soon as a silver bullet comes around, and how fulfilling some seem to find it to be the thing they swore they’d overcome,” it reads. Who is “we,” in this sentence? The same “everyone” who is on these drugs?

New York’s Rats Have Already Won

New York's Rats Have Already Won - The Atlantic

I thought having a rat czar would be an easy win for the city. I was wrong.

The transformation from urban menace to public enemy took place in the 19th century. The first rat attack I could find on record took place in 1860, when a baby was eaten in Bellevue Hospital. Her mother, an Irish serving girl, gave birth unattended in the night, and the child may already have been dead; the mother remembered “a cat or rat on the bed, but could not tell which.” The women’s wing of the hospital, a reporter for The New York Times explained, was built on land reclaimed from the marshes of the East River, on top of rock and rubbish and sewers, “and by these sewers the vile, gregarious, amphibious and nomade vermin, swimming in crowds from place to place, have been induced to stop.” In the female wards, the reporter wrote, “the rats in the night-time run about in swarms … This sounds like fiction, but we are assured that it is true. Myriads swarm at the water side after nightfall, crawl through the sewers and enter the houses. In a bath-tub, last Monday night, forty rats were caught.”

This Revolutionary Stroke Treatment Will Save Millions of Lives. Eventually.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/magazine/evt-stroke-treatment.html

The challenge is that this medical innovation isn’t as deployable as a new pill or device. It can’t be manufactured by the thousands, packed into shipping containers and distributed to every hospital whose administrator clicks Add to Cart. For a qualified specialist, the extraction of the clot itself can be fairly straightforward — but getting the patient to the table in time is a highly complex process, a series of steps requiring layers of training and a rethinking of the protocols that move people around within the medical system. The new “miracle treatment” is the easy part. Bringing it to the people who need it, around the world? Achieving that will be miraculous.

The California Problem

\...........//: The California Problem

greetings! this is a very long post about video games and capitalism. feel free to take breaks if you need them. make sure to stick around t...

so in that case, even though i don't think most people either got the joke or thought it was as funny as me (shout-out to Kepa from Rocketcat Games for getting on the train though), my fake game Gloomp! was a stand-in, for me, which represented the ideal form of art within the commercial indie game space of the time: an entity that is both transformative but also empty, without any particular meaning assigned to it. a squishy container for the over-romanticized ideal of transformative or meaningful 'play' that was poised to take over the space around it, but didn't correspond to anything in particular or make a statement about anything in particular. an object that signified importance in some kind of vague, market-friendly way, by virtue of simply being in the space at that particular time and place. a response to games like flOw that were so focused on the act of expression without having much of any interest in what, exactly, was being expressed. a perfect commodity, basically.

The (de-)radical(-ising) potential of r/IncelExit and r/ExRedPill

OPEN ACCESS: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13675494231153900

This article introduces two forums, r/IncelExit and r/ExRedPill, that have organically emerged in recent years to provide a pathway out of the manosphere for men and boys. Based upon preliminary findings from a broader digital ethnography project, this piece highlights the potential benefits these spaces can offer individuals engaging with them. Furthermore, this article flags opportunities that exploring these forums can offer to academic inquiry on the nature of (de-)radicalisation within the manosphere, along with theoretical issues debated within the critical studies of men and masculinities field. It is also proposed that such forums could serve as an alternative space to provide socially alienated young men and boys with information emphasising the importance of consent and respectful relationships, away from formal school curricula. Finally, this article also discusses the potential effects that neoliberalism may have in shaping how young men approach dating.

Shipping on the edge: Negotiations of precariousness in a Chinese real-person shipping fandom community

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/13678779231159148

The fandom community has been one of the most engaging and active segments in the global participatory culture. However, fans face multilevel and intertwined constraints from various social forces while seeking pleasure and fantasies. This study zooms in on a real-person shipping fan community in China where shippers are doubly marginalized as they fantasize about two male idols being in a romantic relationship in a society with both the derogative projection of fans and low levels of acceptance of same-sex relationships. Relying on a mixed-methods approach, this study found that the radical and disruptive practices are the results of tactical and calculative negotiations in relation to political, social, and technological risks while being driven by pleasure-seeking. I call these practices precarious shipping. The contextualized understanding of the fandom community emphasizes the importance of realizing the local tensions that are rarely addressed in previous literature that focuses on Western fandom.

📹

Years ago, when I was still a part of the the PBSDS Family, I worked alongside Dianna. We’ve stayed distant internet pals, and it was always a delight running into her at conferences, YouTube events, and the like. Dianna has always been fun, always had a smile on her face, and is one of the hardest working, most dedicated folks I ever encountered in that space.

Watching what has happened to her in the wake of her COVID infection, and now battle with long COVID and ME/CFS has been truly, utterly heartbreaking.

Please give this a watch, and if you can please consider helping via the Physics Girl Patreon, as I’m sure her living and medical expenses are through the roof, and a considerable source of stress at a time when that’s the last thing she and her now full-time caretakers need more of.

🤓

Last week, I published the final version of a video script about Elden Ring and Bureaucratic State Administration for Patrons. It’s a full rewrite of script from the end of last year – which was also posted for Patrons – and I think a much better rendering what I was after. I don’t currently have a timeline for shooting, but I’m hoping sooner rather than later.

Also! Following the recent (purposeful) deactivation of the Reasonably Sound Patreon, I made public a small number of Reasonably Sound Patron-exclusive Extras. You can find those wherever pods are cast (though if you have trouble lmk), on the shows feed over at Soundcloud, and here.

There are four in total, and while they might benefit from the context of the full episodes they’re related to, that context is not strictly necessary to enjoy them.

If you give ‘em a listen, let me know if you liked ‘em!

✌️

That’s all I got! Hope you had a great week, and have an equally great weekend ahead. If you liked this issue of 📡, do me a solid and tell your pals:

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