Really important detail in this piece from an anon OPM employee: if you do not already have your coworker’s mobile numbers, or haven’t set up a secure backchannel to talk, do it now.
Slate Magazine
I Work in the Office Carrying Out the Government Purge. Here’s What I Want You to Know.
We’re as freaked out and angry as everyone else.
If there are any gov workers out there who are looking for a sidekick to sort out what to do from here, my door is open and the sliding scale is there for you:
everything changes
Fee model. | everything changes
A successful coaching engagement is a reciprocal relationship in which each of us invests our time, attention, and resources. We commit to each oth...
 That goes for any trans/nb/queer folks as well. Work is so often terrible, but it's also a place of organization, collaboration, reciprocity, sabotage! Whatever happens from here, workers will be part of it, and I'm ready and eager to walk alongside you.
Love and solidarity to the folks at 18f getting sucked into this horrible void. If anyone needs a sympathetic ear to talk out what to do from here, my door is open.
404 Media
GitHub Is Showing the Trump Administration Scrubbing Government Web Pages in Real Time
Watch the Trump administration play DEI whac-a-mole on this government agency's GitHub page.
Erin is (as usual) exactly right about the ways the big platforms are in “bad shape,” and I’d also argue it isn’t just the social platforms—it’s all of the data-grabbing, ad-supported monstrosities.
wreckage/salvage
Bad shape
The idea I keep coming back to is that the big platforms, like Dickens' Marley, were dead to begin with, and are now something particularly bad, wh...
Reentry is a difficult but magical time—a suspension of ordinary expectations and frameworks, a chance to re-story our work and our place within it.
everything changes
Reentry | everything changes
The difficult and sometimes magical time of returning to work.
Big +1 to this counsel to have a digital sabbath:
Left✊ to Our Own Devices
J20 minus 64 — try a digital sabbath
Today's techno-authoritarians depend on our willingness to sacrifice privacy for convenience and connectedness. Don't give it to them. Practice dis...
 Turning my devices off on Saturday evenings and not turning them back on until mid-Monday morning has been such a healing salve for my brain.
Le Guin’s advice—read when you cannot write, sleep when you cannot read—has been top of mind all week and I am intensely grateful.
So much this, but especially the bit about *inefficiency*; to borrow from amb, we need to focus on critical connections over critical mass:
wreckage/salvage
Safer places, now
A lot of people are looking for ways to get off networks run by dipshit billionaires right now, and also for refuges online that don't come with th...
 (cf.
A Working Library
Change is constant
adrienne maree brown outlines the principles of emergent strategy, drawing from the Earthseed verses in Octavia Butler’s Parables series, as well...
)
Searched a very simple question—the kind that a year or two ago would have returned multiple credible and useful answers—and got page after page of obvious slop. What a fucking waste. We made a wonderful thing and then just goddamn threw it away.
Grateful to *Defector* for (again) sharing their annual report—useful not only for insight into how a small media business is run, but also for the description of a worker-led change process.
Defector Annual Report, September 2023 – August 2024 | Defector
Published on October 16, 2024 Purpose of this report This is the fourth year that Defector’s business team is publishing an annual report. Let us...