Drew Chadwick DeVault / ddevault / SirCmpwn - Opinionated white-male-guilt-ridden software developer. Cancelled Hyprland and slandered it as "toxic" and transphobic. Hates X11 users and Hacker News. Lolicon.

[jakkufurosuto]

this fedpost is so funny to me considering we live in the competency crisis. so let me get this straight drew, you want your fellow comrades to just... do whatever they were doing already? very cool!

 

[306h4Ge5eJUJ]

Apply for a job at Palantir, and be incompetent at it. Make yourself a single point of failure, then fail. Remember too that plausible deniability is key – make them work to figure out that you are the problem.

Why doesn't he do that himself? Why does it have to be other people who do the dirty work for him?

 

[HootersMcBoobies]

People like Whitney Webb, James Corbett and The Last American Vagabond have all covered Peter Thiel, Palantir, Aladin, and many of the dangers of technocracy for years. And they've done it without the insane sounding screaming dumbass rhetoric and I don't think any of them are addicted to loli either (and Corbett even lives in Japan, which I'm sure must be DeVault's wet dream).

While DeVault gets some things right here, the way he says it makes him sound like a lunatic and fake-left/right politico-brain.

It is of the utmost importance that we dispense with American individualism and join hands with our allies to resist as one.

Individualism is what has helped countries like America from becoming quickly entrenched in the technocracy that has already pulled much of Europe into its dystopian sand trap .. well that and poverty. He's thinks he's free in the EU because of all that legal weed he smoked in Amsterdam, totally unaware of how America fared better (although not by much) against the insane Plandemic measures. Yes Drew, give up your individualism to fight the power! Your retardid commie brain should be shipped to China.

One of the most important actions you can take is to unionize your workplace. We are long overdue for a tech workers union. If tech workers unionize then we can compel our employers – this regime’s instruments of fascist power – to resist also.

I wonder if the guy has ever had a real software engineering job. Fuck unions, especially in tech. You want to get paid less? You don't ever need unions in tech. The few union shops that are out there (mostly Federal) pay WAY less by at least $40k or more under market. Envy is the root of unions and communism. I've negotiated my own work contract with several employers and have gotten changes made in my favor. I don't need to pay someone a huge chunk of my paycheck to do it.

Why doesn't he do that himself? Why does it have to be other people who do the dirty work for him?

Drew is about you sabotaging your career. He already has his own shitty code hosting CI site with the worst possible UI ever conceived. He's set for never accomplishing anything beyond being a cry baby child who loves his loli and hates on RMS; accusing RMS of the fetishes he himself enjoys. He must want to take everyone down with him.

It's sad because the technocracy issues are real. The government layoffs do scrape off a layer of old cruft that would be against the coming era of data collections and enhanced government tracking. Getting rid of the armed IRS workers rhetoric from the last administration is an obvious propaganda tool to further push the US (and eventually the world) to Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) via "public-private partnerships" (allowing the government to do thinks that wouldn't be acceptable for governments to do). But the way that DeVault goes about addressing it is worse than Lunduke.

 

[The Real Slim Shady]

Maneuver yourself towards the levers of power. At your current job, find your way onto the teams implementing the technology that enables authoritarianism, and fuck it up. Drop the database by “mistake”. Overlook bugs. Be confidently wrong in code reviews and meetings. Apply for a job at Palantir, and be incompetent at it. Make yourself a single point of failure, then fail.

The folks at CIA wrote it better. The way Drew writes it leaves paper trail and exposes the saboteur pretty quickly. What else to expect from such a dimwit?


full PDF at cia.gov

Why doesn't he do that himself? Why does it have to be other people who do the dirty work for him?

The true leaders of the revolution never take part in it, contact and cooperation with the revolutionaries is beneath their self-esteem level. This is why Marx and Engels lived in the Switzerland and wrote books.

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

I wonder if the guy has ever had a real software engineering job. Fuck unions, especially in tech. You want to get paid less? You don't ever need unions in tech. The few union shops that are out there (mostly Federal) pay WAY less by at least $40k or more under market. Envy is the root of unions and communism. I've negotiated my own work contract with several employers and have gotten changes made in my favor. I don't need to pay someone a huge chunk of my paycheck to do it.

I agree with everything except this. I personally look forward to the mass assfucking those corporate cocksuckers can expect sooner or later, because the idea of telling Richie Rich "no" horrifies them. Of course, the simple fact is businesses like Google or Apple literally need not even 1% of their employees. Unionization will never work for them because of that.

 

[x10r4]

The British Airways position on various border disputes​

May 5, 2025 on Drew DeVault's blog

My spouse and I are on vacation in Japan, spending half our time seeing the sights and the other half working remotely and enjoying the experience of living in a different place for a while. To get here, we flew on British Airways from London to Tokyo, and I entertained myself on the long flight by browsing the interactive flight map on the back of my neighbor’s seat and trying to figure out how the poor developer who implemented this map solved the thorny problems that displaying a world map implies.

I began my survey by poking through the whole interface of this little in-seat entertainment system[1] to see if I can find out anything about who made it or how it works – I was particularly curious to find a screen listing open source licenses that such such devices often disclose. To my dismay I found nothing at all – no information about who made it or what’s inside. I imagine that there must be some open source software in that thing, but I didn’t find any licenses or copyright statements.

When I turned my attention to the map itself, I did find one copyright statement, the only one I could find in the whole UI. If you zoom in enough, it switches from a satellite view to a street view showing the OpenStreetMap copyright line:

Note that all of the pictures in this article were taken by pointing my smartphone camera at the screen from an awkward angle and fine-tune your expectations accordingly. I don't have pictures to support every border claim documented in this article, but I did take notes during the flight.​

Given that British Airways is the proud flag carrier of the United Kingdom I assume that this is indeed the only off-the-shelf copyrighted material included in this display, and everything else was developed in-house without relying on any open source software that might require a disclosure of license and copyright details. For similar reasons I am going to assume that all of the borders shown in this map are reflective of the official opinion of British Airways on various international disputes.

As I briefly mentioned a moment ago, this map has two views: satellite photography and a very basic street view. Your plane and its route are shown in real-time, and you can touch the screen to pan and zoom the map anywhere you like. You can also rotate the map and change the angle in “3D” if you have enough patience to use complex multitouch gestures on the cheapest touch panel they could find.

The street view is very sparse and only appears when you’re pretty far zoomed in, so it was mostly useless for this investigation. The satellite map, thankfully, includes labels: cities, country names, points of interest, and, importantly, national borders. The latter are very faint, however. Here’s an illustrative example:

​

We also have our first peek at a border dispute here: look closely between the “Georgia” and “Caucasus Mountains” labels. This ever-so-faint dotted line shows what I believe is the Russian-occupied territory of South Ossetia in Georgia. Disputes implicating Russia are not universally denoted as such – I took a peek at the border with Ukraine and found that Ukraine is shown as whole and undisputed, with its (undotted) border showing Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea entirely within Ukraine’s borders.

Of course, I didn’t start at Russian border disputes when I went looking for trouble. I went directly to Palestine. Or rather, I went to Israel, because Palestine doesn’t exist on this map:

​

I squinted and looked very closely at the screen and I’m fairly certain that both the West Bank and Gaza are outlined in these dotted lines using the borders defined by the 1949 armistice. If you zoom in a bit more to the street view, you can see labels like “West Bank” and the “Area A”, “Area B” labels of the Oslo Accords:

​

Given that this is British Airways, part of me was surprised not to see the whole area simply labelled Mandatory Palestine, but it is interesting to know that British Airways officially supports the Oslo Accords.

Heading south, let’s take a look at the situation in Sudan:

​

This one is interesting – three areas within South Sudan’s claimed borders are disputed, and the map only shows two with these dotted lines. The border dispute with Sudan in the northeast is resolved in South Sudan’s favor. Another case where BA takes a stand is Guyana, which has an ongoing dispute with Venezuela – but the map only shows Guyana’s claim, albeit with a dotted line, rather than the usual approach of drawing both claims with dotted lines.

Next, I turned my attention to Taiwan:

​

The cities of Taipei and Kaohsiung are labelled, but the island as a whole was not labelled “Taiwan”. I zoomed and panned and 3D-zoomed the map all over the place but was unable to get a “Taiwan” label to appear. I also zoomed into the OSM-provided street map and panned that around but couldn’t find “Taiwan” anywhere, either.

The last picture I took is of the Kashmir area:

​

I find these faint borders difficult to interpret and I admit to not being very familiar with this conflict, but perhaps someone in the know with the patience to look more closely will email me their understanding of the official British Airways position on the Kashmir conflict (here’s the full sized picture).

Here are some other details I noted as I browsed the map:

• The Hala’ib Triangle and Bir Tawil are shown with dotted lines
• The Gulf of Mexico is labelled as such
• Antarctica has no labelled borders or settlements

After this thrilling survey of the official political positions of British Airways, I spent the rest of the flight reading books or trying to sleep.

---

[1] I believe the industry term is “infotainment system”, but if you ever catch me saying that with a straight face then I have been replaced with an imposter and you should contact the authorities.​

Source/Archive
Drew ponders the licensing and geopolitics of his airplane seat software. The only interesting info is the very first line.

 

[DavidS877]

Drew ponders the licensing and geopolitics of his airplane seat software. The only interesting info is the very first line.

It's likely that BA simply sends their logos to the software company and they get back the latest build that gets installed. Heck BA may not even manage the install and the underlying software is installed by the company that manufactures it.

Might be Panasonic, I interviewed with that group years ago as I thought it would be cool stuff to play with. Could also be Thales or Rockwell Collins.

Fun fact: Usually the aircraft manufacturers are responsible for base build of the plane, interiors, seats, IFE and everything else is usually done by other companies or provided by them to the aircraft manufacturer for installation.

 

[Eternal Gopnik]

I'd expect the map data to be provided by OpenStreetMap when it says so in the fucking corner, not British Airways, but that's just me, I'm not a galaxy brain like Drew. I also doubt anyone at BA gives a shit about the border of South Ossetia on a map noone but this retarded pedophile will pay attention to, they just take a free map because it's good enough for the purpose.

 

[Three-letter Agency]

Drew ponders the licensing and geopolitics of his airplane seat software. The only interesting info is the very first line.

There's a boundary=disputed property for disputed territory in OSM. This is true in the case of Israel-Palestine: Israel is boundary=administrative but Areas A and B according to Oslo II of the West Bank (in addition to Gaza) are boundary=disputed. I'm guessing the rendering software just wasn't configured to handle this (also the fact that the Occupied Palestinian Territories aren't a contiguous landmass).

Pretty funny that this autist thinks this is some official position of BA on geopolitics when some underpaid contractor probably just threw this together.

 

[Flatline]

he only interesting info is the very first line.

My spouse and I...

Your wife.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

Your wife.

He's never outright said it, but he's implied that he's married to either a theyfab or a TIM.

 

[Flatline]

He's never outright said it, but he's implied that he's married to either a theyfab or a TIM.

He did marry a female they/them.

 

[Glad I couldn't help]

Drew has released an article on how tech workers need to unionize or we will die homeless with global warming by the fascist-plutocrats.

Spoiler: Unionize or die

Unionize or die​

Tech workers have long resisted the suggestion that we should be organized into unions. The topic is consistently met with a cold reception by tech workers when it is raised, and no big tech labor is meaningful organized. This is a fatal mistake – and I don’t mean “fatal” in the figurative sense. Tech workers, it’s time for you to unionize, and strike, or you and your loved ones are literally going to die.

In this article I will justify this statement and show that it is clearly not hyperbolic. I will explain exactly what you need to do, and how organized labor can and will save your life.

Hey – if you want to get involved in labor organizing in the tech sector you should consider joining the new unitelabor.dev forum. Adding a head’s up here in case you don’t make it to the end of this very long blog post.

The imperative to organize is your economic self-interest​

Before I talk about the threats to your life and liberty that you must confront through organized labor, let me re-iterate the economic position for unionizing your workplace. It is important to revisit this now, because the power politics of the tech sector has been rapidly changing over the past few years, and those changes are not in your favor.

The tech industry bourgeoisie has been waging a prolonged war on labor for at least a decade. Far from mounting any kind of resistance, most of tech labor doesn’t even understand that this is happening to them. Your boss is obsessed with making you powerless and replaceable. You may not realize how much leverage you have over your boss, but your boss certainly does – and has been doing everything in their power to undermine you before you wizen up. Don’t let yourself believe you’re a part of their club – if your income depends on your salary, you are part of the working class.

Payroll – that’s you – is the single biggest expense for every tech company. When tech capitalists look at their balance sheet and start thinking of strategies for increasing profits, they see an awful lot of pesky zeroes stacked up next to the line item for payroll and benefits. Long-term, what’s their best play?

It starts with funneling cash and influence into educating a bigger, cheaper generation of compsci graduates to flood the labor market – “everyone can code”. Think about strategic investments in cheap(ish), broadly available courses, online schools and coding “bootcamps” – dangling your high salary as the carrot in front of wannabe coders fleeing dwindling prospects in other industries, certain that the carrot won’t be nearly as big when they all eventually step into a crowded labor market.

The next step is rolling, industry-wide mass layoffs – often obscured under the guise of “stack ranking” or some similar nonsense. Big tech has been callously cutting jobs everywhere, leaving workers out in the cold in batches of thousands or tens of thousands. If you don’t count yourself among them yet, maybe you will soon. What are your prospects for re-hire going to look like if this looming recession materializes in the next few years?

Consider what’s happening now – why do you think tech is driving AI mandates down from the top? Have you been ordered to use an LLM assistant to “help” with your programming? Have you even thought about why the executives would push this crap on you? You’re “training” your replacement. Do you really think that, if LLMs really are going to change the way we code, they aren’t going to change the way we’re paid for it? Do you think your boss doesn’t see AI as a chance to take $100M off of their payroll expenses?

Aren’t you worried you could get laid off and this junior compsci grad or an H1B takes your place for half your salary? You should be – it’s happening everywhere. What are you going to do about it? Resent the younger generation of programmers just entering the tech workforce? Or the immigrant whose family pooled their resources to send them abroad to study and work? Or maybe you weren’t laid off yet, and you fancy yourself better than the poor saps down the hall who were. Don’t be a sucker – your enemy isn’t in the cubicle next to you, or on the other side of the open office. Your enemy has an office with a door on it.

Listen: a tech union isn’t just about negotiating higher wages and benefits, although that’s definitely on the table. It’s about protecting yourself, and your colleagues, from the relentless campaign against labor that the tech leadership is waging against us. And more than that, it’s about seizing some of the awesome, society-bending power of the tech giants. Look around you and see what destructive ends this power is being applied to. You have your hands at the levers of this power if only you rise together with your peers and make demands.

And if you don’t, you are responsible for what’s going to happen next.

The imperative to organize is existential​

If global warming is limited to 2°C, here’s what Palo Alto looks like in 2100:<a href="https://drewdevault.com/2025/06/09/2025-06-09-Unionize-or-die.html#fn:1">1</a>

Limiting warming to 2° C requires us to cut global emissions in half by 2030 – in 5 years – but emissions haven’t even peaked yet. Present-day climate policies are only expected to limit warming to 2.5° to 2.9° C by 2100.<a href="https://drewdevault.com/2025/06/09/2025-06-09-Unionize-or-die.html#fn:2">2</a> Here’s Palo Alto in 75 years if we stay our current course:

Here’s the Gulf of Mexico in 75 years:

This is what will happen if things don’t improve. Things aren’t improving – they’re getting worse. The US elected an anti-science president who backed out of the Paris agreement, for a start. Your boss is pouring all of our freshwater into datacenters to train these fucking LLMs and expanding into this exciting new market with millions of tons of emissions as the price of investment. Cryptocurrencies still account for a full 1% of global emissions. Datacenters as a whole account for 2%. That’s on us – tech workers. That is our fucking responsibility.

Climate change is accelerating, and faster than we thought, and the rich and powerful are making it happen faster. Climate catastrophe is not in the far future, it’s not our children or our children’s children, it’s us, it’s already happening. You and I will live to see dozens of global catastrophes playing out in our lifetimes, with horrifying results. Even if we started a revolution tomorrow and overthrew the ruling class and implemented aggressive climate policies right now we will still watch tens or hundreds of millions die.

Let’s say you are comfortably living outside of these blue areas, and you’ll be sitting pretty when Louisiana or Bruges or Fiji are flooded. Well, 13 million Americans are expected to have to migrate out of flooded areas – and 216 million globally<a href="https://drewdevault.com/2025/06/09/2025-06-09-Unionize-or-die.html#fn:3">3</a> – within 25 to 30 years. That’s just from the direct causes of climate change – as many as 1 billion could be displaced if we account for the ensuing global conflict and civil unrest.<a href="https://drewdevault.com/2025/06/09/2025-06-09-Unionize-or-die.html#fn:4">4</a> What do you think will happen to non-coastal cities and states when 4% of the American population is forced to flee their homes? You think you won’t be affected by that? What happens when anywhere from 2.5% to 12% of the Earth’s population becomes refugees?

What are you going to eat? Climate change is going to impact fresh water supplies and reduce the world’s agriculturally productive land. Livestock is expected to be reduced by 7-10% in just 25 years.<a href="https://drewdevault.com/2025/06/09/2025-06-09-Unionize-or-die.html#fn:5">5</a> Food prices will skyrocket and people will starve. 7% of all species on Earth may already be extinct because of human activities.<a href="https://drewdevault.com/2025/06/09/2025-06-09-Unionize-or-die.html#fn:6">6</a> You think that’s not going to affect you?

The overwhelming majority of the population supports climate action.<a href="https://drewdevault.com/2025/06/09/2025-06-09-Unionize-or-die.html#fn:7">7</a> The reason it’s not happening is because, under capitalism, capital is power, and the few have it and the many don’t. We live in a global plutocracy.

The plutocracy has an answer to climate change: fascism. When 12% of the world’s population is knocking at the doors of the global north, their answer will be concentration camps and mass murder. They are already working on it today. When the problem is capitalism, the capitalists will go to any lengths necessary to preserve the institutions that give them power – they always have. They have no moral compass or reason besides profit, wealth, and power. The 1% will burn and pillage and murder the 99% without blinking.

They are already murdering us. 1.2 million Americans are rationing their insulin.<a href="https://drewdevault.com/2025/06/09/2025-06-09-Unionize-or-die.html#fn:8">8</a> The healthcare industry, organized around the profit motive, murders 68,000 Americans per year.<a href="https://drewdevault.com/2025/06/09/2025-06-09-Unionize-or-die.html#fn:9">9</a> To the Europeans among my readership, don’t get too comfortable, because I assure you that our leaders are working on destroying our healthcare systems, too.

Someone you love will be laid off, get sick, and die because they can’t afford healthcare. Someone you know, probably many people that you know, will be killed by climate change. It might be someone you love. It might be you.

When you do get laid off mid-recession, your employer replaces you and three of your peers with a fresh bootcamp “graduate” and a GitHub Copilot subscription, and all of the companies you might apply to have done the same… how long can you keep paying rent? What about your friends and family, those who don’t have a cushy tech job or tech worker prospects, what happens when they get laid off or automated away or just priced out of the cost of living? Homelessness is at an all time high and it’s only going to get higher. Being homeless takes 30 years off of your life expectancy.<a href="https://drewdevault.com/2025/06/09/2025-06-09-Unionize-or-die.html#fn:10">10</a> In the United States, there are 28 vacant homes for every homeless person.<a href="https://drewdevault.com/2025/06/09/2025-06-09-Unionize-or-die.html#fn:11">11</a>

Capitalism is going to murder the people you love. Capitalism is going to murder you.

We need a different answer to the crises that we face. Fortunately, the working class can offer a better solution – one with a long history of success.

Organizing is the only answer and it will work​

The rich are literally going to kill you and everyone you know and love just because it will make them richer. Because it is making them richer.

Do you want to do something about any of the real, urgent problems you face? Do you want to make meaningful, rapid progress on climate change, take the catastrophic consequences we are already guaranteed to face in stride, and keep your friends and family safe?

Well, tough shit – you can’t. Don’t tell me you’ll refuse the work, or that it’ll get done anyway without you, or that you can just find another job. They’ll replace you, you won’t find another job, and the world will still burn. You can’t vote your way to a solution, either: elections don’t matter, your vote doesn’t matter, and your voice is worthless to politicians.<a href="https://drewdevault.com/2025/06/09/2025-06-09-Unionize-or-die.html#fn:12">12</a> Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page demonstrated this most clearly in their 2014 study, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”.<a href="https://drewdevault.com/2025/06/09/2025-06-09-Unionize-or-die.html#fn:13">13</a>

Gilens and Page plotted a line chart which shows us the relationship between the odds of a policy proposal being adopted (Y axis) charted against public support for the policy (X axis). If policy adoption was entirely driven by public opinion, we would expect a 45° line (Y=X), where broad public support guarantees adoption and broad public opposition prevents adoption. We could also substitute “public opinion” for the opinions of different subsets of the public to see their relative impact on policy. Here’s what they got:

For most of us, we get a flat line: Y, policy adoption, is completely unrelated to X, public support. Our opinion has no influence whatsoever on policy adoption. Public condemnation or widespread support has the same effect on a policy proposal, i.e. none. But for the wealthy, it’s a different story entirely. I’ve never seen it stated so plainly and clearly: the only thing that matters is money, wealth, and capital. Money is power, and the rich have it and you don’t.

Nevertheless, you must solve these problems. You must participate in finding and implementing solutions. You will be fucked if you don’t. But it is an unassailable fact that you can’t solve these problems, because you have no power – at least, not alone.

Together, we do have power. In fact, we can fuck with those bastards’ money and they will step in line if, and only if, we organize. It is the only solution, and it will work.

The ultra-rich possess no morals or ideology or passion or reason. They align with fascists because the fascists promise what they want, namely tax cuts, subsidies, favorable regulation, and cracking the skulls of socialists against the pavement. The rich hoard and pillage and murder with abandon for one reason and one reason only: it’s profitable. The rich always do what makes them richer, and only what makes them richer. Consequently, you need to make this a losing strategy. You need to make it more profitable to do what you want. To control the rich, you must threaten the only thing they care about.

Strikes are so costly for companies that they will do anything to prevent them – and if they fail to prevent them, then shareholders will pressure them to capitulate if only to stop the hemorrhaging of profit. This threat is so powerful that it doesn’t have to stop at negotiating your salary and benefits. You could demand your employer participate in boycotting Israel. You could demand that your employer stops anti-social lobbying efforts, or even adopts a pro-social lobbying program. You could demand that your CEO cannot support causes that threaten the lives and dignity of their queer or PoC employees. You could demand that they don’t bend the knee to fascists. If you get them where it hurts – their wallet – they will fall in line. They are more afraid of you than we are afraid of them. They are terrified of us, and it’s time we used that to our advantage.

We know it works because it has always worked. In 2023, United Auto Workers went on strike and most workers won a 25% raise. In February, teachers in Los Angeles went on strike for just 8 days and secured a 19% raise. Nurses in Oregon won a 22% raise, better working schedules, and more this year – and Hawaiian nurses secured an agreement to improve worker/patient ratios in September. Tech workers could take a page out of the Writer’s Guild’s book – in 2023 they secured a prohibition against the use of their work to train AI models and the use of AI to suppress their wages.

Organized labor is powerful and consistently gets concessions from the rich and powerful in a way that no other strategy has ever been able to. It works, and we have a moral obligation to do it. Unions gets results.

How to organize step by step​

I will give you a step-by-step plan for exactly what you need to do to start moving the needle here. The process is as follows:

1. Building solidarity and community with your peers
2. Understanding your rights and how to organize safely
3. Establishing the consensus to unionize, and do it
4. Promoting solidarity with across tech workplaces and labor as a whole

Remember that you will not have to do this alone – in fact, that’s the whole point. Step one is building community with your colleagues. Get to know them personally, establish new friendships and grow the friendships you already have. Learn about each other’s wants, needs, passions, and so on, and find ways to support each other. If someone takes a sick day, organize someone to check on them and make them dinner or pick up their kids from school. Organize a board game night at your home with your colleagues, outside of work hours. Make it a regular event!

Talk to your colleagues about work, and your workplace. Tell each other about your salaries and benefits. When you get a raise, don’t be shy, tell your colleagues how much you got and how you negotiated it. Speak positively about each other at performance reviews and save critical feedback for their ears only. Offer each other advice about how to approach their boss to get their needs met, and be each other’s advocate.

Talk about the power you have to work together to accomplish bigger things. Talk about the advantage of collective action. It can start small – perhaps your team collectively refuses to incorporate LLMs into your workflow. Soon enough you and your colleagues will be thinking about unionizing.

Disclaimer: Knowledge about specific processes and legal considerations in this article is US-specific. Your local laws are likely similar, but you should research the differences with your colleagues.

The process of organizing a union in the US is explained step-by-step at workcenter.gov. More detailed resources, including access to union organizers in your neighborhood, are available from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). But your biggest resources will be people already organizing in the tech sector: in particular you should consult CODE-CWA, which works with tech workers to provide mentoring and resources on organizing tech workplaces – and has already helped several tech workplaces organize their unions and start making a difference. They’ve got your back.

This is a good time to make sure that you and your colleagues understand your rights. First of all, you would be wise to pool your resources and hire the attention of a lawyer specializing in labor – consult your local bar association to find one (it’s easy, just google it and they’ll have a web thing). Definitely reach out to AFL-CIO and CODE-CWA to meet experienced union organizers who can help you.

You cannot be lawfully fired or punished for discussing unions, workplace conditions, or your compensation and benefits, with your colleagues. You cannot be punished for distributing literature in support of your cause, especially if you do it off-site (even just outside of the front door). Be careful not to make careless remarks about your boss’s appearance, complain about the quality of your company’s products, make disparaging comments about clients or customers, etc – don’t give them an easy excuse. Hold meetings and discussions outside of work if necessary, and perform your duties as you normally would while organizing.

Once you start getting serious about organizing, your boss will start to work against you, but know that they cannot stop you. Nevertheless, you and/or some of your colleagues may run the risk of unlawful retaliation or termination for organizing – this is why you should have a lawyer on retainer. This is also why it’s important to establish systems of mutual aid, so that if one of your colleagues gets into trouble you can lean on each other to keep supporting your families. And, importantly, remember that HR works for the company, not for you. HR are the front lines that are going to execute the unionbusting mandates from above.

Once you have a consensus among your colleagues to organize – which you will know because they will have signed union cards – you can approach your employer to ask them to voluntarily recognize the union. If they agree to opening an organized dialogue amicably, you do so. If not, you will reach out to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to organize a vote to unionize. Only organize a vote that you know you will win. Once your workplace votes to unionize, your employer is obligated to negotiate with you in good faith. Start making collective decisions about what you want from your employer and bring them to the table.

In this process, you will have established a relationship with more experienced union organizers who will continue to help you with conducting your union’s affairs and start getting results. The next step is to make yourself available for this purpose to the next tech workplace that wants to unionize: to share what you’ve learned and support the rest of the industry in solidarity. Talk to your friends across the industry and build solidarity and power in mass.

Prepare for the general strike on May 1st, 2028​

The call has gone out: on Labor Day, 2028 – just under three years from now – there will be a general strike in the United States. The United Auto Workers union, one of the largest in the United States, has arranged for their collective bargaining agreements to end on this date, and has called for other unions to do the same across all industries. The American Federation of Teachers and its 1.2 million members are on board, and other unions are sure to follow. Your new union should be among them.

This is how we collectively challenge not just our own employers, but our political institutions as a whole. This is how we turn this nightmare around.

A mass strike is a difficult thing to organize. It is certain to be met with large-scale, coordinated, and well-funded propaganda and retaliation from the business and political spheres. Moreover, a mass strike depends on careful planning and mass mutual aid. We need to be prepared to support each other to get it done, and to plan and organize seriously. When you and your colleagues get organized, discuss this strike amongst yourselves and be prepared to join in solidarity with the rest of the 99% around the country and the world at large.

To commit yourselves to participate or get involved in the planning of the grassroots movement, see generalstrikeus.com.

Join unitelabor.dev​

I’ve set up a Discourse instance for discussion, organizing, Q&A, and solidarity among tech workers at unitelabor.dev. Please check it out!

If you have any questions or feedback on this article, please post about it there.

Unionize or die​

You must organize, and you must start now, or the worst will come to pass. Fight like your life depends on it, beause it does. It has never been more urgent. The tech industry needs to stop fucking around and get organized.

We are powerful together. We can change things, and we must. Spread the word, in your workplace and with your friends and online. On the latter, be ready to fight just to speak – especially in our online spaces owned and controlled by the rich (ahem – YCombinator, Reddit, Twitter – etc). But fight all the same, and don’t stop fighting until we’re done.

We can do it, together.

Resources​

Tech-specific:

• unitelabor.dev (new)
• CODE-CWA (US)
• Tech Workers Coalition (Global)
• UTAW (UK)
• Prospect (UK)
• Alphabet Workers Union (Google)

General:

• AFL-CIO (US)
• workcenter.gov (US)
• generalstrikeus.com (US)

Send me more resources to add here!

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1. Map provided by NOAA.gov ↩︎
2. Key Insights on CO₂ and Greenhouse Gas Emissions – Our world in data ↩︎
3. World Bank – Climate Change Could Force 216 Million People to Migrate Within Their Own Countries by 2050 (2021) ↩︎
4. Institute for Economics & Peace – Over one billion people at threat of being displaced by 2050 due to environmental change, conflict and civil unrest (2020) ↩︎
5. Bezner Kerr, R.; Hasegawa, T.; Lasco, R.; Bhatt, I.; Deryng, D.; Farrell, A.; Gurney-Smith, H.; Ju, H.; Lluch-Cota, S.; Meza, F.; Nelson, G.; Neufeldt, H.; Thornton, P. (2022). “Food, Fibre and Other Ecosystem Products” ↩︎
6. Régnier C, Achaz G, Lambert A, Cowie RH, Bouchet P, Fontaine B. Mass extinction in poorly known taxa. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2015 Jun 23;112(25):7761-6. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1502350112. Epub 2015 Jun 8 ↩︎
7. Andre, P., Boneva, T., Chopra, F. et al. Globally representative evidence on the actual and perceived support for climate action. Nat. Clim. Chang., 2024 ↩︎
8. Prevalence and Correlates of Patient Rationing of Insulin in the United States: A National Survey, Adam Gaffney, MD, MPH, David U. Himmelstein, MD, and Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH (2022) ↩︎
9. Improving the prognosis of health care in the USA Galvani, Alison P et al. The Lancet, Volume 395, Issue 10223, 524 - 533 ↩︎
10. Shelter England – Two people died homeless every day last year (2022) ↩︎
11. United Way NCA – How Many Houses Are in the US? Homelessness vs Housing Availability (2024) ↩︎
12. Caveat: you should probably still vote to minimize the damage of right-wing policies, but across the world Western “democracies” are almost universally pro-capital regardless of how you vote. ↩︎
13. Gilens M, Page BI. Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics. 2014 ↩︎

Now, unlike a lot of people here, I'm not against unions per se, but I think they can often be useful in only some economic situations. Otherwise, they can just another level of (sometimes corrupt) bureaucracy a worker must negotiate with; other times, they can be completely unviable.

Notice he doesn't mention 'outsourcing' once, but it is quite likely that the response to a tech union is even more aggressively pursue outsourcing to by-pass the tech union. Maybe their labour will be of lower quality, but as Drew's article states, the tech bosses are quite willing to trade some quality for lower wages with 'online schools and coding "bootcamps"' grads, AI systems and H1B(!) visa holders. Notice that many of his examples of successful strike actions - Los Angeles teachers, Oregon and Hawaii nurses, the Writer's Guild strike - are job sectors that are protected from outsourcing by either the nature of their jobs or a bunch of regulations.

But I think DeVault just wants to writes some powerful agitprop without giving any though if it could work or now.

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

He's right about unionization, but business owners love the fact that they've made blowhards like Drew the face of them. I stopped reading when he went off the rails and started ranting about climate change.

 

[HootersMcBoobies]

He's right about unionization

Is he? I've negotiated a lot of my own contracts, and I think I've made a lot more money that I would have if I were in a union shop. I know some people in Federal IT who are unionized and they make shit and are constantly overworked (or they're useless and never get cut).

Unions gave us weekends and the 40 hour work week, but they've crossed to the point where they keep shitty people in jobs where they can't even bolt cars properly. Back in the 2000s, most trucking companies would order from the two non-union Peterbilt factories so they'd get trucks that didn't fall apart. I knew an engineer at the union shop who found all these QA issues and they just paid him more money to shut up about it.

At this point, I would never join a union IT shop. Also Drew moved to the fucking Netherlands. A US job that cost $150k/yr tops out at €55k there! He moved to a nation/continent with a shitty startup culture and underpaid tech workers. Guy is a fucking moron on every possible level.

 

[DavidS877]

Now, unlike a lot of people here, I'm not against unions per se, but I think they can often be useful in only some economic situations. Otherwise, they can just another level of (sometimes corrupt) bureaucracy a worker must negotiate with; other times, they can be completely unviable.

but they've crossed to the point where they keep shitty people in jobs where they can't even bolt cars properly.

I'm of the opinion that outside actually dangerous industries that unions benefit only those on the left side of the bell curve, which Drew is firmly on.

 

[306h4Ge5eJUJ]

Also Drew moved to the fucking Netherlands. A US job that cost $150k/yr tops out at €55k there! He moved to a nation/continent with a shitty startup culture and underpaid tech workers.

Software dev positions certainly don't cap out at 55k€. Living expenses are also significantly lower in Europe than they are in the US, so this comparison is all kinds of off.

 

[Glad I couldn't help]

Drew has given his thoughts on the Xlibre situation, all while never using the name because he doesn't want to give it attention.

Just speak the truth​

Today, we’re looking at two case studies in how to respond when reactionaries appear in your free software community.

Exhibit A​

It is a technical decision.

The technical reason is that the security team does not have the bandwidth to provide lifecycle maintenance for multiple X server implementations. Part of the reason for moving X from main to community was to reduce the burden on the security team for long-term maintenance of X. Additionally, nobody so far on the security team has expressed any interest in collaborating with xxxxxx on security concerns.

We have a working relationship with Freedesktop already, while we would have to start from the beginning with xxxxxx.

Why does nobody on the security team have any interest in collaboration with xxxxxx? Well, speaking for myself only here – when I looked at their official chat linked in their README, I was immediately greeted with alt-right propaganda rather than tactically useful information about xxxxxx development. At least for me, I don’t have any interest in filtering through hyperbolic political discussions to find out about CVEs and other relevant data for managing the security lifecycle of X.

Without relevant security data products from xxxxxx, as well as a professionally-behaving security contact, it is unlikely for xxxxxx to gain traction in any serious distribution, because X is literally one of the more complex stacks of software for a security team to manage already.

At the same time, I sympathize with the need to keep X alive and in good shape, and agree that there hasn’t been much movement from freedesktop in maintaining X in the past few years. There are many desktop environments which will never get ported to Wayland and we do need a viable solution to keep those desktop environments working.

I know the person who wrote this, and I know that she’s a smart cookie, and therefore I know that she probably understood at a glance that the community behind this “project” literally wants to lynch her. In response, she takes the high road, avoids confronting the truth directly, and gives the trolls a bunch of talking points to latch on for counter-arguments. Leaves plenty of room for them to bog everyone down in concern trolling and provides ample material to fuel their attention-driven hate machine.

There’s room for improvement here.

Exhibit B​

Concise, speaks the truth, answers ridiculous proposals with ridicule, does not afford the aforementioned reactionary dipshits an opportunity to propose a counter-argument. A+.

Extra credit for the follow-up:

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The requirement for a passing grade in this class is a polite but summary dismissal, but additional credit is awarded for anyone who does not indulge far-right agitators as if they were equal partners in maintaining a sense of professional decorum.

If you are a community leader in FOSS, you are not obligated to waste your time coming up with a long-winded technical answer to keep nazis out of your community. They want you to argue with them and give them attention and feed them material for their reactionary blog or whatever. Don’t fall into their trap. Do not answer bad faith with good faith. This is a skill you need to learn in order to be an effective community leader.

If you see nazis you ban nazis — it’s as simple as that.

---

The name of the project is censored not because it’s particularly hard for you to find, but because all they really want is attention, and you and me are going to do each other a solid by not giving them any of that directly.

To preclude the sorts of reply guys who are going to insist on name-dropping the project and having a thread about the underlying drama in the comments, the short introduction is as follows:

For a few years now, a handful of reactionary trolls have been stoking division in the community by driving a wedge between X11 and Wayland users, pushing a conspiracy theory that paints RedHat as the DEI boogeyman of FOSS and assigning reactionary values to X11 and woke (pejorative) values to Wayland. Recently, reactionary opportunists “forked” Xorg, replaced all of the literature with political manifestos and dog-whistles, then used it as a platform to start shit with downstream Linux distros by petitioning for inclusion and sending concern trolls to waste everyone’s time.

The project itself is of little consequence; they serve our purposes today by providing us with case-studies in dealing with reactionary idiots starting shit in your community.

 

[Redeemer]

If you see pedophiles you ban pedophiles — it’s as simple as that.

 

[Not Yet Implemented]

Exhibit B​

Concise, speaks the truth

I want to highlight this part: "reactionary dipshits" a subjective opinion. It can be true in light of your criteria for reactionary, but it sure as fuck isn't a technical assessment. I'm sure they are doing it at least semi-on purpose, because presenting their vibe-based retard fantasies as a natural law has been the strategy for a long time now. Calling it technical is an additional level of MATI-bait. I'd react to my own post with a hat if I could, because it almost worked.