fullmoon
@fullmoon

this comic really drove home for me that a lot of automation isn't about reducing human labor but rather devaluing it (by providing an automated veneer for human labor)

the part of this that really strikes home for me personally is open source maintenance (which is extremely devalued). there's actually a lot of labor that goes into keeping open source projects up-to-date with their dependencies and to resolve (what are essentially) social issues that people confuse for technical issues


ireneista
@ireneista

damn yeah actually we need to chew on that, the thing about the labor in free software and open source having been devalued. that framing has strategic implications that it will take us a while to digest.


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in reply to @ireneista's post:

Especially in contexts where the norm is closed or mostly-closed source and the software is only part of the product (okay, so large-enough-budget games), I've tended to summarise that is "information wants to be free, programmers want to eat/get paid". But that leaves out the part where even closed source maintenance can be a lot of work: even if you're feature stable, bitrot is real and people in general act too much like it isn't.

(I'm not advocating for the closedness part here, FWIW: it's clear that in the long run that makes life harder for everyone who wants to make it possible to continue running something, especially as the toolchains have historically been closed as well)

like we've talked with you about this before and you said something to that effect but none of those discussions prompted new thoughts in us the way the comparison to gig work in gabby's post did. maybe that's on us. it's just... a slightly different angle on the same topics, an angle which we think offers more productive directions

I think it's been long enough that modern gig work was comparatively new where each of us is/was at the time, too?

(but yes, and the nature of open source maintenance is mind work in a way that most "gig economy" work in the UK very much isn't: there's a collapsing of perceived class lines there)