Note:

This article contains the backstory explaining my motivation for starting this project. If that doesn’t appeal to you, you may want to skip ahead to reading about what we need or what services we’ll be offering.

How it started⌗

I learned to code for the usual reasons: I had a knack for it and the money was supposed to be good. I found a job at a robotics company through a recruiter. My job wasn’t officially coding, it was data analysis, but I managed to cram some programming work in and built a lot of really nice internal tooling for them both as a contractor and then as a full-time employee…

Unfortunately, I was hired full time in March of 2020.

The company’s investment dried up, and I was one of half of the company who was laid off.

While looking for work amidst the 2020 quarantine, while the protests raged and supply chains began to demonstrate their fragility, I realized that there were very few organizations who were hiring someone with my qualifications and that far, far, far fewer were organizations whose goals I felt were ethical.

In fact, the questionable ethics I had brushed off while employed seemed to loom a little larger. Did I even want to work for a company whose harm seemed so small in comparison to the long lists of DoD opportunities I saw on LinkedIn or Indeed?

Not really. It’s still harmful. Point me to some tech work that pays decently and isn’t.

Shit, from this point on, I didn’t (and still don’t) even trust toilet paper and food to remain on the shelves, what am I doing here?

So my boyfriend and I moved to the countryside, and I planted a garden. It didn’t do super well, but I learned a good bit. And I’ve been here, gardening, cooking, and helping out ever since.

But y’know what? I still code. I still build shit for the web. I host a mastodon instance. I’m good at it. Better than I am at gardening, to be honest, but I guess that’s just what you get after almost 30 years of going living on this planet but not as a part of it.

Digital Mutual Aid⌗

During this time, I met the folks who are trying to build the No Mugs No Masters coffee-roasting worker- cooperative. We’ve become good friends, and when the state finally processed our incorporation, I rebuilt their web site for them, which had been hacked and turned into a spam link farm.

It was just my way of performing mutual aid. I didn’t expect anything in return, but it seemed fair to all of us that I become a worker-owner with them after having done so much work for them.

Just as I was putting the finishing touches on their site, one of the members pointed out Working Class History’s new “On This Day in Working Class History” iframe embed. I liked the idea of embedding their content in our site, but I didn’t relish the thought of embedding an iframe, so I developed an API to dynamically inject their content, and contributed it upstream to their project. Libcom.org is now working on integrating with the same API, and we’ve talked about developing a more robust API to make it work faster and more securely.

At some point while talking with the folks at Working Class History and the other worker-owners at No Mugs No Masters, I realized that a lot of the people doing the most important work find the sort of work I do to be exhausting, tedious, confusing, and often downright impossible.

Not only that, but a lack of understanding and expertise in this area often leads revolutionary organizations to become dependent on capitalist enterprises, leaving them vulnerable to censorship.

I realized, it looks to me like there’s a huge need here for tech workers to contribute to revolutionary projects. These folks need tools for communication, organizing, ecommmerce, and outreach that are resillent and are not subject to the whims of capitalist, fascist, hierarchical organizations.

At the same time, I’m watching the tech workers in general being laid off en masse, and the transformation of major social media platforms into tools to serve fascists and capitalists rather than their communities. A huge labor pool, tens of thousands of skilled workers who are just out of work and back in the cycle of begging capitalists for a salary.

So, I propose some of us come together and form an organization to connect this labor pool with the need for it. We can alleviate the burden of tech infrastructure from revolutionary organizations. We can create a non-exploitative workplace for ourselves to ensure our needs are met.

What’s next?⌗

Are you a worker who’s interested in our project? Take a look at our monetization strategy or what we need from you.

Part of a revolutionary anti-capitalist organization, hate tech, and wish someone else would just take care of that for you? Take a look at what services we’ll offer and see if we might be able to help you.

Either way, we want to hear from you! Give us a shout on any of the various platforms we’re on!