Tootfinder

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.

Netscape Navigator 2.0 was released 30 years ago today [jwz]
#internet

Gemini 3 Pro is integrated into the Gemini app, which now has 650M MAUs, and powers Google Search's AI Mode conversational search feature (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/business/google-gemini-3.html

Google Unveils Gemini 3, With Improved Coding and Search Abilities
The new artificial intelligence model is the second the company has released this year. OpenAI and Anthropic made similar updates a few months ago.

New maps that added
five Republican districts in Texas
hit a legal roadblock on Tuesday,
with a federal judge saying
the state cannot use the 2025 maps
because they are probably “racially gerrymandered”.
The decision is likely to be appealed,
given the push for more Republican-friendly congressional maps nationwide
and Donald Trump’s full-court press on his party to make them.
A panel of three federal judges in Texas said in a decision t…

One of my undergrad history RAs has set my heart aflutter - they dated their time sheet in the only sensible manner: YYYY/MM/DD.

Don't ever underestimate people's ability to overwear underwear.

@… @… @… In my usage, make’s ability to determine whether a target needs to be rebuilt is essential.
I in…

@… @… @… In my usage, make’s ability to determine whether a target needs to be rebuilt is essential.
I in…

Beyond Surface Alignment: Rebuilding LLMs Safety Mechanism via Probabilistically Ablating Refusal Direction
Yuanbo Xie, Yingjie Zhang, Tianyun Liu, Duohe Ma, Tingwen Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15202

Beyond Surface Alignment: Rebuilding LLMs Safety Mechanism via Probabilistically Ablating Refusal Direction
Jailbreak attacks pose persistent threats to large language models (LLMs). Current safety alignment methods have attempted to address these issues, but they experience two significant limitations: insufficient safety alignment depth and unrobust internal defense mechanisms. These limitations make them vulnerable to adversarial attacks such as prefilling and refusal direction manipulation. We introduce DeepRefusal, a robust safety alignment framework that overcomes these issues. DeepRefusal forc…

Q&A with Sam Altman on OpenAI's "code red" call, enterprise strategy, product ambitions, IPO plans, ChatGPT's personalization plans, and more (Alex Kantrowitz/Big Technology)
https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/sam-altman-on-openais-plan-to-win<…

Sam Altman on OpenAI’s Plan to Win, AI Personalization, Infrastructure Math, and The Inevitable IPO
OpenAI's CEO joins Big Technology for a candid discussion covering OpenAI's strategy, its product ambitions, its ability to pay for $1 trillion+ in infrastructure, going public, and much more.