Hugs. I imagine this is gonna start happening to more of us. Is there anywhere else it would be good to keep up with you?

And when you really think about it, Capital is really just a recorded value of spent labor.

Data is the new Capital.

Like Capital, Data flows easily in and out of systems, institutions, organizations, nations, etc.

This is nothing like the flexibility of data.

You see. Oil is physical. It comes out of the ground. It has to be shipped. It has to be refined. It has to be shipped again. Before it can finally be put to use.

Not sure how cringe it is to turn a thread about unionizing into a plug for your business. But if you wanna learn more, ping me 💜

Using your website as a space to promote the content of your community is accessible on a budget.

My company Blue Shark Friends, teaches communities how to do this.

But. We started with our own community. Because you should never trust a community organizer who doesn’t have community.

Well. Shameless plug, but I did. I started my own tech company. And I teach other community organizers how to do the same.

Not only this but my partner and I developed a digital community-building strategy, the Shiver Cycle (bluesharkfriends.com/shiver-cycle)

And this all sounds great… and completely out of reach. I mean. Who actually has the capital to start their own streaming service or to build their own tech company?

The thing is creators have started to catch on to this and started to realize that the only way forward is to own your own content:

Nebula, MeansTv, Dropout.tv, etc - creators have started to realize that collective ownership of the content is essential to any strategy of organizing resistance.

Granted, that’s a stupid idea that wouldn’t work long-term. But it doesn’t have to.

It just needs to work long enough to break the momentum of any kind of collective organizing.

And. If you’ve been paying attention to the advancements in AI, you’ll realize that platforms are preparing to just use old content to predictively create new content using your name and/or image.

Now, the content that previously existed can replace the worker and continue to do labor regardless of whether or not the actual person exists.

Mix that with AI and income inequality and we are in dire straits that structurally have deeper roots than other labor movements have ever faced.

Before, if the workers stopped providing labor, the company came to a halt.

But, the calculus is different virtually. These platforms own your content. And while a platform will slowly die off without creators constantly churning out new content (this is the attention economy after all).

It’s less a cliff and more of a gentle slope.

Old content = views = money.

I think the answer is because you can’t unionize.

Normally, what unionizing does is practice collective ownership of your labor.

For a company, that can be catastrophic. No labor = no products = no money.