Speaking Truth to Power (More Effectively)
Behind every 'tech' giant there's some dark secret and they already seek to demonise/discredit critics/exposers
Some time this weekend or next week we'll start publishing a series or mini-book/booklet regarding the notion of "tech rights". At the same time we prepare some "books" to publish next year, we noted here before. There's a lot in store. This year we gradually transitioned from publishing immediately (the subject of the day) to investing in future essays and preparing material for future years. The community grew (83 users in IRC yesterday - an all-time record for our self-hosted network), the site matured a lot (it's faster and better organised), Gemini took off (14423 requests yesterday, 11767 the day before that, 12973 and 10925 the two days prior, respectively). We wrote more programs to help us manage the site, the workflow, the research/curation etc. We also belatedly took much-needed action against severe abuse [1, 2].
This past week we published relatively little because the weather here was too good to stay indoors (it felt like summer) and it was our wedding anniversary, but the expectation is that next week we'll be a lot busier. This past week one major contribution we made was, we helped expose a secret mass-layoffs round at IBM, motivating some media (at long last) to cover it days late:
The article "IBM has reportedly laid off thousands" seems days late and IBM seems to have broken some laws by keeping it secret and misusing "forced" NDAs (not voluntary).
It's hardly surprising that some of the attacks on us come from IBM's people. It's not just Microsoft.
We're gradually starting to see some coverage of what IBM tried really hard to hide (to the point of doing dubious if not outright illegal stuff), e.g. IBM is Quietly Axing Thousands of Jobs, Biggish Blue is getting smaller, and IBM quietly axing thousands of jobs, source says (there are a few more headlines like these; expect more soon).
Also mind this comment from under an hour ago (it's true, it is accurate):
IBM is about 60 billion dollars in debt and short-term asset sale can only raise about 13 billion, so IBM is basically in deep trouble.
After more than a century IBM can simply vanish, just like Western domination and "modern" overlords of so-called 'tech' (a subject of an upcoming series). █