"Around 2009, I was running a women’s clothing store in Nanjing, a painful job. My girlfriend at the time broke up with me. I was 30 and very disappointed in myself. I started writing as a way to escape all of that. It was like praying."

I wasn't able to get a dosa from the @nydosa vendor in Washington Sq Park because the line, but did leave feeling inspired by the level of trust and comradeship in this conference. Thanks TWC & CAiT! 🐇✊🐇

Finally, the day started with a mandatory Covid rapid test, an N-95 mask, and a lukewarm cup of coffee.😷 🐇 The morning keynotes was my favorite part. We heard from the NYT Tech Guild, No Azure for Apartheid, and the Amazon Labor Union. Rigorous and genuine reporting on strategy, tactics, and wins.

For Session Block A I went to "Data Centers as Chokepoints" featuring two data center workers sharing direct experience and insight on conditions inside server facilities in Virginia, contending with pay disparities across the engineer, technician, and logistics hierarchy.

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Especially the need for psychological safety in the workplace, a basic requirement for performing any kind of labor really, but "knowledge work" in particular. This was a recurring thread throughout the conference.

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For Session Block B, I went to "Caste in Tech: A Transnational Analysis" by Nishant T. I was already well aware of #casteintech through Equality Labs and Murali Shanmugavelan's work datasociety.net/points/the-c... but Nishant did well grounding the history and situating his own lived experience.

The session I transferred over to was called "We Can't Afford to Lose Each Other: Conflict & Care in Tech Worker Organizing" by Helen Y., Crystal S., and Luca M. Here is where I learned about the tekmil as a more constructive feedback structure. It struck a cord.
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For the last session I attended the talk on The Luddite Lab Resource Hub because I wanted to show up for colleagues, but by 5pm I needed more heart and less brain so I transferred to another session. Apologies to Alex, Tina, Minsu, and Sophie.

The night ended at a self-organized happy hour mixer. I felt slight social fatigue and sadly didn't talk to many people. It pointed to a lack of in-group connection within the tech worker organizing scene that I want to patch.
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Thoughts running backwards in the style of a tekmil — a form of collective reflection practiced in Rojava that values brevity, critique, and humility. (Source cited further downstream).

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European states, like other decaying colonial powers in decadence, are seeing the chickens coming home to roost.

Access to compute shapes sovereignty in the multipolar world order. This explains the accelerated death drive to build. Without cloud capital of your own you become a terms taker.

The trend does not seem to be slowing down.

Data intensive cloud computing plus huge tax incentives are driving the data center expansion, even in the most drought stricken places in the country like Wyoming, Texas, Utah, and Arizona.