Notices by Mandy Brown (aworkinglibrary@mstdn.social)

“I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/live-at-enmity-with-unreality

“…do they not prove that education, the finest education in the world, does not teach people to hate force, but to use it?” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/where-there-is-a-wall

“To be a Luddite today is to refuse the fatalism of techno-inevitability & to demand that technology serve the many, not the few. It is to assert that questions of labor, agency & justice must come before speed, efficiency & scale.” https://www.brookings.edu/articles/we-should-all-be-luddites/

Once you see RTO as one part of an anti-labor movement, it makes other things clear: in-office attendance requirements are designed to force tech workers to remain in expensive cities. Because a tech salary + a rural mortgage = a whole lot of power to say no.

A corollary to no ethical consumption under capitalism is no ethical *employment*: there is no where you can work and keep your hands clean. The choices are about where to draw the line, and how to mitigate the harm on your side of it.

“Living a life well lived must surely include coming to an acceptance of your own finitude.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/to-live

Love a wildcat strike. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/17/government-orders-striking-air-canada-flight-attendants-return-work

The “culture of fear” noted here is something that I’m seeing across all big tech, and it’s suicidal: frightened workers either quit or comply. They don’t take risks, they don’t create anything new, and they don’t ship. Nothing good will come of this. https://www.theverge.com/notepad-microsoft-newsletter/709144/microsoft-layoffs-2025-ai-notepad

“What you have is, in essence, a very grassroots and cheap approach to launder misinformation to the public.” https://www.404media.co/googles-ai-is-destroying-search-the-internet-and-your-brain/

The most important thing to understand about the huge federal layoffs—which the Supreme Court just cleared the way to continue—is that they are a strategic attack on equality in *all* workplaces: https://unbreaking.org/issues/equality-at-work-decimating-the-federal-workforce/

So, there’s LOT happening right now, but A Working Library is 17 years old today and I’m going to be insufferable and say a few things about what it’s like to have a blog that’s nearly old enough to vote. Mute accordingly.

I wrote this two years ago, about what it’s like to keep coming back: “A practice is built on the movement of return.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/fifteen-or-one-third

I (unknowingly) planted a seed in that piece, with the phrase “coming home” itself returning in a piece from last fall. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/coming-home

That’s been so much of this work, and part of what I think is so lovely about blogging as a mode of writing: it’s a way of sowing, tending, reaping ideas and language over time.

And language here is key: I’m not just writing to communicate information. Language is an art, and I’m grateful to have been able to practice it with such thoughtful and attentive readers over these many years.

One of the many distressing things about all the AI nonsense is that it commodifies language, it demeans the beautiful gift of the written word, language made solid, sharp, dangerous.

You should read every “here’s how AI will change your job” in the context of who has the power to change the conditions of work, and how that power is exercised. And remember that major changes to working conditions come about in one of two ways: as negotiation, and as coercion.

The thing that keeps coming up as I talk to people about AI in their workplaces is how *dehumanizing* it is. It’s dehumanizing to ask a machine to do something, and then have to correct it over and over; it’s dehumanizing to be told to read something that involved little to no human effort to make.

If you were (wisely) offline over the weekend, I wrote about the ideology of AI and why we need to shift our stance in relation to it: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/toolmen

I’ve spent the last year reading, thinking, and talking with workers about AI and I’ve concluded that AI is not a technology—it’s an *ideology*, and it must be engaged with as such. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/toolmen