Sources: Pinduoduo and Temu owner PDD fires dozens following a fistfight between employees and Chinese officials probing fraudulent deliveries on its platform (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-17/pd…
The #IWW #GDC as an antifascist organization was always kind of a hack. It was a beautiful hack and it worked well for what it did.
In 2016, as Trump was rising, I found info from the Twin Cities GDC. They were super organized, building an amazing community defense organization. When we (Seattle) went to set up our chapter, following their lead, they were extremely supportive. When I got shot, Twin Cities folks were at my house keeping my partner safe. They literally flew people out to support us. They very much remain in my mind when I think about what mutual aid looks like.
Unionism is an important strategy of a larger fight. But it's important to realize that it's not the other way around. The GDC was built to defend the union, because there wasn't something larger to do that work. It filled a gap.
When we organized against Trump, we tried to make the GDC the greater thing. We tried to make the GDC into the vehicle for social revolution against the fascist threat... And it sort of worked. We were able to do a lot.
But that was never what it was built to do. It was always built as an appendage of the IWW. This contains its own problem. If Unionism is the revolutionary movement, then it becomes impossible to build a truly revolutionary society. Unionism centers "workers" which implicitly decenters those who can't work in the traditional sense (the young, the elderly, those physically or mentally able to work). It also decenters care labor that hasn't yet been widely commodified. Sure, there are all types of hacks to patch the holes, but the fundamental construction starts from the wrong assumptions.
It felt, for a while, like things could go another way. Like that our ability to bring members in could shift things a bit, maybe set the GDC on more equal footing with the core focus of the IWW. But that was always an illusion, far less important to think about than the crushing terror of the regime we were fighting.
Now, I will absolutely trash talk the IWW on occasion but in the end I do think they're doing good and important work. Any criticism I have should be taken with a grain of salt... And I know I do have a lot of salt. Again, Unionism is an important strategy. It's useful both in improving immediate material conditions and as part of the most powerful weapon we have against the capitalist system: the general strike. It's important, I can't say that enough. But it's not sufficient.
I've been thinking about this a bit recently, and I wonder if there are any other GDC organizers or former organizers who might be feeling the same. Feel free to DM me. I'd like to get some more perspectives and see if my understanding from several years ago deviates significantly from what other folks are feeling right now.
I'd also like to bounce some ideas around that come from my own organizing experience.
Apparently the US government departments are starting to join Bluesky and are getting ratioed in that the accounts are being blocked more than they are followed.
Doesn't really seem to make sense at first. The US Department Of Transportation isn't going to show up as a reply guy in your mentions and the spooks aren't going to use that account to spy on your posts.
Is the blocking then entirely performative? Because blocks are public they are votes?
I guess really it's people deliberately reading the recommended-for-you AI-driven slop feeds.
Blocked users won't show up in your machine-learning robot-recommended feeds that people apparently must be reading over there.
Just not-following would be enough for me, I don't see things I don't follow. But if you read the robot-DJ feeds then anything can show up, so you have to preemptively block it. If only to train the robot shuffle.
#blueSky #fediverse #aiSlopFeed
It’s obvious that this tool was made by people who care about data and care about humans. It’s not even that it’s •perfect•; it’s just that it’s •thoughtful•.
That kind of human-to-human feeling of “we did our best because we care about the strangers who use this tool” just seems almost like an act of radical defiance in this Era of Enshittification. I appreciate it so much.
Naomi Watts got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and usually I don't even follow things like that, but I dig her so much and she deserves it like crazy. Wow, she's been in 97 films. Most people like her in the Lynch stuff. But for me, I mean.. King Kong, The Ring, and I ❤ Huckabees ALONE 🔥
"As trading activity spiked on [#Crypto] exchanges and prices whipsawed, multiple centralized platforms suffered glitches. Binance’s site went completely down at one point, and customers reported unexplained account freezes, unsuccessful trades, and automated protections like stop-losses failing to trigger"
Again, of course. People build crypto exchanges because they want to get ric…
„ For teaching, this means teaching language with an explicit focus on wellbeing of all class members and striving to be an inclusive setting for all learners. It means finding ways to bring in critical reflection to prompt thinking about social structures, people’s thoughts and feelings in relation to their positioning within social structures, and ways to value and empower individuals.“
This applies to all of us #Researchers - why do we keep flying all around the world just to give (or watch) some talks that could have been given or watched online???
Yes, in-person conferences are slightly better for "networking"... but is this really worth destroying the planet?!
Quoting @…
A UK family and a US family sue Meta for the alleged wrongful deaths of their teenage sons, who died by suicide after falling victim to sextortion on Instagram (Libby Brooks/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/d