Paul Cantrell
In 2016, resistance meant defiance. This time it means sabotage.
That’s the meta-lesson that emerges from me reading this piece from @jaykuo and The Big Picture. The essay is mostly about strategy for D politicians, but that that larger lesson there? That’s for all of us.
Not just defiance. Sabotage.
https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/trump-resistance-democrats-senate-lawfare
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Paul Cantrell
What does that mean in practice? Well, here’s a relatively gentle practical example:
Suppose you’re on a software team that gets a contract doing work that will benefit the fascists.
Defiance means you refuse the project, maybe quit your job.
Sabotage means you finally embrace that management mandate to use more AI. Really embrace it. Be incredibly productive. Generate lots of code. LOTS of code. Utterly obscene quantities of code.
2/
Paul Cantrell
My fellow software folks, we all know how make a project drag on for •years• giving off all the signs of making progress while never, ever reaching the point of being releasable before the whole thing is finally scrapped.
At last, this is an ability we can use for good.
I just, but actually I don’t jest. Sand in the gears, people.
Not just defiance. Sabotage.
/end
Paul Cantrell
@vruz
why_not_both.gif
(And with all seriousness, both matter! In some situations, highly visible sabotage will be immediately countered and stopped, whereas low-grade, almost-invisible sabotage sustained over time will have a much larger net impact. Both tools will matter.)
vruz
Not sand. Wrenches.
alcinnz
@inthehands Protip: I've seen the embracing of hype very effectively slow down projects! And bikeshedding too!
And besides that gives to spend time learning the "new" tech...
Now that I have the patience to do things I don't believe in...
Bernard Tyers
I've read the CIA’s "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" and it's still very relevant.
Large areas of national governments work in this way.
https://www.openculture.com/2022/01/read-the-cias-simple-sabotage-field-manual.html
Paul Cantrell
@joe “we need to set a benchmark of 25% minimum AI code to meet Google-level quality benchmarks”
Joe Groff
@inthehands "I heard Google's writing 25% of their code with AI now,"
Paul Cantrell
A beautiful, beautiful example of the above (thank you, @dumbledope):
aburka 🫣
@inthehands @dumbledope wonder how many times this kind of thing has been carried out, but never discovered so the would-be resisters went down in history as collaborators
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