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ahnkili.bsky.social
gabor
@ahnkili.bsky.social
52 followers 150 following 27 posts
they, free 🇵🇸
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ahnkili.bsky.social
we did it :D
Tabletop Workers United announcement of a tentative agreement
May 30, 2025 at 9:20 PM
ahnkili.bsky.social
get off your phone (telling themself)!!!

www.late-review.com/p/the-eterna...
To put it a different way, part of our collective feeling of futurelessness, I believe, is caused by design. In phoneworld, it’s not just that we’re getting the news. It’s that we’re getting the news, and the knee-jerk reactions of hundreds of people to that news, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, locking us into an eternal present where the time passes in huge slices and nothing changes beyond the movement of the thumb along the glass screen. In phoneworld, politics closes in on us with the sheer repetitive brunt of this hopelessness. Because of this subjugation, we are unable to give space to our own thoughts and feelings, unable to act because we just want to see what’s next in the feed. Maybe it’ll be good news, maybe it’ll be funny, maybe it’ll be smart (less a possibility these days), but in order to get that glimpse of hope or at least of levity, one has to suffer through the same iterations of terribleness, until, all of a sudden, an hour has passed, maybe two. And by this time, one’s palms are sweating, one’s heart is racing, and one finds that one’s sense of personhood or self-in-the-world, one’s grounding in physical or temporal reality have all been diminished — but that’s only if one can recognize the signs of the diminishment. At any rate, the result is the same: Nothing can be done because we have done and are doing nothing. The smartphone has deskilled seemingly everything, even something as fundamental to human life as reading. But it’s especially deskilled political organizing. Perhaps a subconscious reason why the Left puts so much hope in the labor movement is because organizing one’s workplace is a largely offline endeavor. It takes place face to face in a spatially and temporally anchored place where everyone, despite all that may divide them, is subjected to the same material conditions, the same injustices. The most pro-social idea on earth is that only through collective power can we, the individual, make for ourselves a better life, and let me tell you, the tech billionaires do not want you to know that. My haters will be quick to point out that I, however, rely on these platforms to make my living. I have no shop floor. It’s true. Part of my despair comes from realizing that, without social media, and long out of school, I know nothing about how to reach other people. I came of age in the 2010s and have not known a politics without the smartphone, without social media, without the specatacle of virality and the belief that, in this open space, one can utilize these tools to affect change. And now, I am alone, in my apartment, afraid. My friends are alone, in their apartments, afraid. One of the imminent questions of our moment is: what would it take to relearn how to do political work offline, to recognize that there will perhaps be a time — in the very near future — where online work will be rendered impossible for those of us not in favor of the administration? The old ways are already crumbling now in this moment of highly siloed algorithms, where no two people’s internet is the same. Hence, we must quickly abandon the 2010s idea that our content, concepts, and actions will, through the internet, find the masses. That ship sailed after Black Lives Matter. And after so many of the activists involved in that movement died under mysterious circumstances, before we embark again, we need to reckon with the fact that we carry with us a device that tracks our location and listens to everything we say. It is naive to think this will not have consequences. Those black bloc anarchists people used to rib for being paranoid are looking pretty damn smart right now. More and more, I’ve started to think that, just as people rightly request the donning of masks in public settings to protect others and ourselves, maybe it’s time to treat our phones the same way.
March 24, 2025 at 6:09 AM
ahnkili.bsky.social
I wrote a thing and it's in this zine. For those that want to read my piece it's also here: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Go get organized :)
Upkeep spring 2025 zine!
March 10, 2025 at 3:22 PM
ahnkili.bsky.social
loved all the lists tonight. all the unfair decks really excited me
December 7, 2024 at 6:30 AM