“Burnout shifted its meaning: from a symptom experienced by people struggling to change society to one experienced by people trying too hard to succeed within it.” 
A Working Library
Loss of an ideal
From phenomena to pathology.
mandy brown
mandy brown
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Thinking about reading, work, and technology. Reformed tech leader; now helping people do their best work.
Posting primarily from https://aworkinglibrary.com/thinking/; I log in about once a week.
Reading: https://aworkinglibrary.com
Practicing: https://everythingchanges.us
Pronouns: she/they
Location: Lenapehoking / Philadelphia
Super looking forward to my Halloween costume, woman reading in bed by 9PM.
“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.” 
Brookings
We should all be Luddites | Brookings
Courtney Radsch discusses rehabilitating the idea of Luddites as people concerned with the control and impact of technology.
“The disenfranchised men of the manosphere disdain women, and yet women continue to be asked to feel pity and concern for them.” 
London Review of Books
Emily Witt · Do you feel like a failure? In the Manosphere
The winners in an autocracy have little in common with the losers, but putting on aviator sunglasses or a leather jacket...
Nearly two years since I made a regular practice of turning my digital devices off one day a week and I cannot overstate how restful it is. I won’t make a virtue of it—I don’t believe in virtue!—but those days are so intensely *alive,* and that’s enough.
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: 
Equality at Work: Explainer — Unbreaking
How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.
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.
“While the upsides of adopting LLM technology to you as a worker might seem marginally useful now, that adoption directly contributes to that extraction, ultimately devaluing labor.” 
Economics & labor rights in AI skepticism | Henry From Online
The personal site & portfolio of creative web developer Henry from Online
“It is very very disturbing that your response is always to lie.” 
Diabolus Ex Machina
This Is Not An Essay
One way to know that “AI is coming for your jobs” is a bluff is to see it paired with “and cancer will be cured.” The same Ferengis pushing AI are also working to cut funding for medical research! No cure for cancer is forthcoming without working scientists. 
The "AI jobs apocalypse" is for the bosses
As Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei forecasts mass job loss, Business Insider lays off staff and embraces AI