In order to work, the #50501movement will need to do the following 3 things: 1. Articulate clear and politically achievable goals 2. Target the capital that supports fascism, not just their representatives in government 3. Scale and escalate #50501protests IMHO, it should also message itself as a "pro-democracy" movement, since Trump and Musk are both profoundly undemocratic but also the US electorial system that lead to Trump/Musk is profoundly undemocratic. 🧵

Hey fellow tech folks. We might get asked to do something terrible. I'd like to start a bit of an open discussion about how to deal with such requests. The first thing I might recommend is enthusiastically agree to do whatever it is then forget about it and do something else. If asked about it in the future, pretend this is the first you've heard about it. Play as dumb as you can for as long as you can. Now, if you can't get away with delaying by not doing anything anymore then find the absolute most complicated way to do whatever it is. This is actually a great time to use an LLM. Have an LLM write all your code then just run it. Ask the LLM to fix anything that's broken. Take some extra steps to force downgrade or upgrade libraries to incompatible versions. Write all of your own interfaces by hand. Write your own date parsing library. Write all of your own SQL without any abstractions. Add an LLM in the middle some how. Use libraries that haven't been supported for 15 years. Ever want to write code in Python 2.0? Now's your chance! Debug everything with Wireshark, no matter what it is. I bet there's a VB script library to do what you need to do, and if you can just write a C wrapper around that it'll interface perfectly with perl, as soon as you can get that old FoxPro program running in wine. I bet it would be easier without that commit hook that changes every zero to a capital letter O. "I'm getting the craziest error. It works on my system!" There are a million ways to make things insanely complicated, and most of us have seen people legitimately do these things out of pure incompetence. Now, if you end up against the wall and think you might get fired package everything up and hand it off to someone else, but make sure you make it clear that you're almost done and it should be super easy to finish. Leave behind some fun puzzles for the next person to figure out. "How strange...the output changes when I change the whitespace, but not when I change the text. What is that?" Who's got some other fun suggestions for extremely malicious compliance?

I posted a while back saying that #FreeLuigi has to make it to the streets to really mean something. It has to be more than a hashtag. Revolutionary change is a DIY project. There have been some actions, and there can be a lot more. If we can keep building momentum in to January 20th, we can give #Trump a real problem. His base overwhelmingly supports Luigi, while he and his donors are #BrianThompson. #Luigi drove a wedge between the oligarchs taking power and the wolf they've been holding by the ears. The deeper we drive that wedge, the more energy the oligarchs will have to spend in damage control and the less they'll have to damage us. I didn't provide good guidance on how to make that happen. Fortunately, It Could Happen Here made one:

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IMHO, we have to do two things: 1. Unite eachother 2. Divide our enemies To fulfill the first objective, look at all the ways oligarchs fail. Healthcare is a big one. How can we build systems that fill the hole they profit off of digging? Take care of eachother in all the ways they hurt us (support houseless camps, support immigrants, support people fighting for healthcare, etc). Organize locally to improve mass transit. To fulfill the second, keep focusing on this issue. Banner drops, street protests, noise demos, posters, benefit shows, etc, all keep people's minds on this. The longer we talk about #LuigiMangione, the more we erode the facade of culture war and the more we reveal the underlying reality of class war.

Boomers: I'm going to retire to Florida at 65, maybe earlier. X: if I take on a side gig as an Uber driver, I can probably retire at 75. Millenials: I don't think retirement is going to be a thing when I get old. Z: I don't think Florida is going to exist in 10 years.

I finally had the "satanic cult" talk with my oldest. "If you find out a friend of yours or their family is in a satanic cult, ask them how they joined. It's been really hard to connect since we moved and it would be great to find our community."

"AI" developers: I'm going to make something intelligent and then make it do exactly what I tell it to do. Parents: O_o

J6 could easily have worked, were it not for his support backing out. Trump had the most important connection set up, #ErikPrince, by appointing his sister, #BetsyDeVos to Secretary of Education. #J6 was a clown show for a number of reasons, but imagine it again with a few Prince supplied soldiers. It would have probably gone quite differently. But why didn't the J6 coup attempt get more backing? A lot of what follows is speculation. We may never know many of the facts, even if surviving members of the administration end up in The Hague. We don't really need to speculate much about how Trump will respond to civil unrest. It turns out we have a very clear idea based on what he did in Portland. We also have a very clear strategy for resisting crackdowns, because Portland did it really well. Now, here's the speculation: I think that Erik Prince and other billionaires backed off when they saw how badly Trump handled Portland, and Prince especially backed off because his involvement was speculated if not made visible. So what happened? Portland's George Floyd uprising became the testing ground for Trump's suppression strategy. Someone realized that the constitution doesn't apply to any city within 100 miles of the border. This includes the ocean, which means almost every US city doesn't have constitutional protections. How can this be? Well, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) are allowed to operate within 100 miles of the border. The constitution doesn't apply to non-citizens. Anyone within this zone can simply be treated as a non-citizen when interacting with CBP. After, I think it was, a month or so of protest, groups of people in military gear and unmaked civilian vehicles started grabbing random people off the street and intimidating them. People were not being arrested or read their rights, they were just beging bagged and kidnapped then released. After a lot of speculation, eventually it came out that these were mercenaries who were employed via contracts with CBP. There were a lot of people saying Academi and Eric Prince were involved. So why didn't this work? People stayed in the streets. The protests kept growing. People weren't intimidated. Not only that, but it wasn't just radicals. The streets were filled with normal people, normal people who didn't participate in te black bloc but didn't rat them out either. One of the last things I remember before law enforcement backing down was the leaf blower bloc: a bunch of folks, many identifying themselves as dads, brought leaf blowers to blow teargas back at cops. And I think this is what saved us from J6 being much worse than it was. Everyone in the streets, normal people, the kind of people who care about their lawns, showed up every night for weeks on end. The protests lasted over 100 days. This is the model to look at. This, I think, is what made the oligarchs flinch and so many of them flip on Trump at the last minute. This time they won't just play catch and release though. This time they will probably deport people. Trump deported legal US citizens during his first term. These were "mistakes." This time he's prepared the people for mass deportations. This is his most powerful weapon. He doesn't have to declare martial law, he can just send CBP to a city and fill their ranks with Academi troops. They can kidnap anyone they want, destroy any documents they have, and deport people to whatever friendly black site they want. So when Trump is talking about deportation, he may start with immigrants but he really wants to deport anyone who resists. This is why it's critical to resist deportation from the beginning, and to do it with everyone. Everyone in the street as soon as possible. Terrify the oligarchs enough and they'll stab him in the back again.

Now is probably a good time for my US comrades to learn about what #Wagner is doing in Africa (renamed as #AfricaCorps but really #AfrikaKorps). #Academi (formerly #Blackwater) will be deployed to support ICE to suppress protests, like they probably were in Portland at the end of Trump's first term. But don't rule out Putin sending in Wagner to support Trump if things get wild during this term, perhaps to violently suppress the next anti-police uprising. This is less of a "I think this is likely" and more of a "well, anything can happen" type of thing. It never hurts to know more about the world. #uspol

Slavery continues to be the main driver of right wing #uspol at all levels. The most salient horror for a lot of people is abortion access. Forced birth is literally "involuntary labor." Forced reproductive labor is simply corvée (temporary de facto slavery) enforced by the state. Forced birth serves at least 3 purposes related to slavery. It forces women, especially black and brown women, to stay in low wage jobs. Black and brown women are the basis for the service industry. Forced birth is a mechanism to enforce wage slavery. Wealthier people tend to be able to circumvent laws against forced birth, so it's really about targeting people who are already disadvantaged. Families who can't plan birth are more likely to reproduce generational poverty. When combined with the push to strip away support, children of forced birth are more likely to themselves be in poverty. Two pipelines exist to siphon forced birth children in to other forms of slavery: school to military, and school to prison. Folks who don't have military family may not realize that the military is a form of slavery in the sense of people being owned. Some military jobs can pay a lot. They can lift people out of poverty. There is a reason people join the military, beyond adherence to Americanism. But none of that makes it not slavery. If you get a hand tattoo, you are charged with "damaging government property." Soldiers are government property. It's pretty literal. Prison labor is a pervasive element in the US economy. Basically all major corporations use it. While folks may say that the things I've talked about so far are not literally slavery, or may contest my use of language, prison labor is often explicitly slavery justified by the gap in the 13th amendment ("except as punishment for a crime"). Those who aren't siphoned off generally remain in poverty to perpetuate the next generation of this system. Now, the thing about slavery us that the point isn't actually the free labor. In terms of labor, these pipelines are actually more expensive (to society) than just having a free society. Just think about it. Chattel slavery required a massive portion of the society to suppress slave revolts. Police, today's slave catchers, are *by far* the largest part of any city budget and prisons are incredibly expensive. The "free labor" that corporations get is really massive subsidization. The point of slavery is to maintain social stratification. All wage workers are, in a sense, kept (to lesser and lesser degrees) in subjection by the threat of more extreme forms of slavery. The high wage worker obeys because they are afraid of becoming a low wage worker. The low wage worker obeys because they are afraid of being houseless. Houselessness is made illegal so they can be swept in to prisons and enslaved. The entire capitalists system is built on increasing threats of subjugation and violence, where stratified classes are aligned more and more with the dominant class and have more and more incentive to enforce it's will on other subjugated people. It's slavery all the way down. Malcolm X was taking about this structure in 1963. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=jf7rsCAfQCo

There is a playbook for resisting fascism specifically in the US. It's loaded with relevant information about what has worked and what hasn't. It covers everything from peaceful resistance strategies, to fascist coups against democratically elected governments in the US, to how firearms fit in to resisting oppression, to carrying out a successful guerilla warfare campaign against authoritarianism. It's called "black history." #uspol